I have thousands of cases of evidence that QiGong is a very healthy thing.
No you do not. You certainly do not have an proper studies of such nonsense.
Assuming that QiGong is a mild exercise is idiotic. It is a martial art and healing system.
It is neither a martial art nor is there any evidence that it is a healing system. There is nothing martial about it. I've been involved in various martial arts my whole life and QuGong is exactly the sort of fraudlent crap that guilible people like yourself get sold. I'm betting you think tai chi is a fighting art too. Most of the so called martial arts are really stylized dance classes with a bit of mythology tacked on. Fun, maybe healthy but most don't teach anything about fighting. Just exercise, usually in funny looking costumes. If you want to see what a real martial art looks like, go to an MMA gym, a college wrestling room, or a jiu-jitsu class. Go see what the armed forces do. THOSE are martial arts.
As for it being a "healing system" put down the cool aid. It's been studied and there is NO evidence it has any effect on health aside from that of mild exercise. If you want me to believe you then present the evidence.
Medicine helps in situations where medicine helps... e.g. a common cold. It does not really help when you have a slipped disc. Qi/Chi Gong does not help you either, but it might prevent getting a slipped disc.
I really wonder why intelligent people like you claim that. Hint: you can not double blind (neither the applyer of the needle nor the receiver know where he needle is placed) manual treat a human body.
Not true at all. You can simulate the needle placement with other stimulus. An electric shock can feel like a needle prick as long as the patient cannot see it. And there have been studies about the effectiveness of double blinding for acupuncture specifically.
You want to tell me that you have a study in the US that proves that 4 billion people outside of the USA are treated wrong
First off there are NOT 4 billion people receiving acupuncture so lets dispense with that nonsense right away. Acupuncture is used by a small percentage of the population - most of whom are inclined towards "alternative medicine" which for the most part is a PC term for quackery. Second, there are studies on the effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment and they mostly find that it is no better than placebo. So YES, I am saying EXACTLY that people are being treated wrong. People take all sorts of folk remedies all over the globe that have no evidence of efficacy.
Half the planet is using acupuncture and related medical treatment like Shiatsu and Thai Massage
More than half the planet also believes that there is an invisible man in the sky who created them and that they should obey despite there being precisely zero evidence for the existence of such a being. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't equal evidence. There are quite a number of treatments that insurance pays for for which the evidence of effectiveness is scant to non existent. They pay for it because the evidence there is limited evidence for or against its effectiveness. Most insurance in the US will not cover acupuncture under normal circumstances. Some insurance companies will turn a blind eye to it with a prescription from a doctor but this is the exception rather than the rule.
It is much more plausible that the US pharm. and health care industry simply is funding fraud studies and dismisses simple treatments because they rather like to sell pharmaceutics instead.
Only to an idiot who is inclined to believe conspiracy theories over scientific studies. Are you seriously arguing that modern medicine does not work despite the ample proof that it does.
Well of course it could be a coincidence, but it's a very freaky coincidence..
Or some other bit of your behavior other than a random conversation might have lead to that result. Some search term or search term related to a different search term. We rarely have conversations in a total (figurative) vacuum. It's pretty easy to forget about other things we've done that may be related or we may not realize are related. I'm not denying the possibility that Google really is listening in but I'd need a LOT more evidence than a single anecdote which in all likelihood is probably just either a coincidence or has an alternate explanation. Plus that seems like an incredibly economically inefficient way to serve ads. They really would have no way to know the context of any given conversation and selling the ad space would be a tough go.
However I paid a couple of hundred dollars for my phone, it's main and basic function is to make phone calls, so it's 100% wrong for phone calls to be eavesdropped on by the stock apps (i.e. Google apps) for the purpose of advertising-driven data harvesting.
Two points on that: 1) Smartphones are not devices whose primary purpose is to make phone calls. Never have been and never will be. They are handheld computers who just happen to also be able to make phone calls. If you just want something to make calls then you really don't need a smartphone. Good news is that phones who's real purpose is to make calls are a LOT cheaper.
2) The ENTIRE purpose of google making Android is for them to gather data about you and serve advertising to you. They developed it so that companies like Apple and Microsoft couldn't shut them out of the mobile ad market. If you expect Google to not "spy" on you with the intent to serve you ads then you are being naive. It might not be by listening in to a conversation but they definitely are watching your activity.
The real answer is "None of the Above" but put a gun to my head and the answer is clearly Apple. Why? I trust their profit motive the most. Apple just wants to sell me more Apple products and actually has a not completely terrible record with regard to privacy. All the others want to sell data about me to third parties of unknown reliability. Amazon would be the next option, again because of their profit motive which is to sell me physical and digital stuff. Google and Facebook I don't trust at all. They are advertising companies start to finish and I have no interest in cooperating with that.
I can't see anyone wanting facebook having a microphone in their home.
No worse than Google, Amazon, etc. Honestly I don't really trust any of them though I will agree that I trust Facebook the least of the big tech firms. By a lot.
There also is the fact that I don't have any use for this thinly disguised spy devices. They strike me as a solution looking for a problem. I don't use Siri on my phone so it's unclear why I would be interested in wiring my house with another service I won't use that might be spying on me to boot.
There is no reason to believe that even with self driving cars Uber will ever achieve profitability. Honestly I'm kind of astonished they have managed to get the funding they have because they haven't shown any credible path to profitability that I am aware of.
They are not sufficiently profitable with regular rides to service their debt.
And somehow we are to believe that they will beat their well financed competition in developing them? Self driving cars will require tens of billions at minimum to develop (probably hundreds of billions) and decades to get to a state where they can be sold to or used by the general public. Uber is losing money at an almost record setting clip and we're expected to believe they can seriously compete with Google and GM and Ford? All of which are profitable, have billions in cash, have proven business models, and most of whom have WAY more experience developing cars and related technologies than Uber.
Honestly I think Uber is doomed. The only question is when. They are well financed but it's not clear how they ever get to profitability. And no Amazon is not an obviously good analog here.
There have been several eerie instances where Google auto-suggested a search item (based on the first letter or first few letters) that has just been talked about on the phone.
And how do you know this is not just coincidence? If you talked about it it's credible to believe that other people did so as well.
No, it was not a common search term, no it did not make sense based on location, past search history, browsing or whatever. If those weren't just very weird coincidences (which I find hard to believe), then the only logical explanation was that Google was analyzing the voice conversation.
How do you know it wasn't common? To be honest I'm HIGHLY dubious that Google is listening to your conversations. While I cannot deny that its a possibility it doesn't make a lot of sense that they could do this without it becoming public knowledge. SO many people would have to keep it a secret that I just don't really buy it.
Of course if you use Android always remember that Google makes their money from advertising so any decisions they make will be through that lens. The more information they have about you the more effective they will be at selling advertising so use Android and any other Google products with that in mind. Not saying be paranoid but be aware.
Considering that nearly 2/3 the state's population lives in the metro Phoenix area (4.5million out of 7 million) it's actually pretty close to being a factual statement.
maybe they did demonstrate their claims using the most empirical method of all: "Does it work?"
If it actually works it should be straight forward to actually prove it. Placebos "work" (sometimes) but we don't rely on them for treatment for good reasons.
Everyone who practices Chi Gong or other internal arts knows that... since millennia.
Oh do they now? Are you seriously claiming that QiGong is anything more than a mild form of exercise? In spite of the fact that there is little evidence to support its efficacy for any specific health benefit.
You know what they call alternative medicine that is shown to actually work? Medicine.
Acupuncture is not based on 'points' on meridians.
Acupuncture is pretty much not based on anything at all. Certainly not based on scientific evidence. The evidence regarding its efficacy is thin and it clearly is being used to "treat" far too many conditions for which there is no evidence that it has any effect. There appears to be some evidence that it can help certain pain conditions (though this is still being evaluated) but the mechanism of action is unclear and the clinical practice guidelines are inconsistent to put it mildly. The NIH has been researching acupuncture and until they can show with appropriate studies evidence of effectiveness beyond placebo and a mechanism of action acupuncture should be regarded with skepticism.
If layman do a 'double blind' study it is most likely that both needles are at the wrong point:)
Most double blind studies of acupuncture to date show that it is nothing but a placebo under most circumstances and for most conditions.
I don't buy the argument that unlocking one phone is tantamount to a backdoor to all phones.
Then you don't understand the technology at work. With any encryption if you break it on one device you have de-facto broken it on every device that shares that encryption system. That's how it works like it or not. It is analogous to the act of creating a key. If you hand a key to a third party (even a trusted one) that key can (and probably will) be copied without your knowledge or consent. If there is a backdoor with a weak or nonexistent key there is no way to hide it so that only the "good" guys have access.
He obviously had the PR department go over this with him.
Of course he did. That doesn't mean is he wrong. He is absolutely correct that any tool created to circumvent encryption WILL be used in ways that were not intended or authorized. Including by law enforcement which has a LONG history of abusing their authority.
The FBI and Apple both chose to appeal to the public. Apple inserted privacy and security language in their response, and won. That sounds great except next time the request won't be public so you won't even know how it turns out, and Apple will be just fine with that, because the illusion is maintained.
Oh so you are going with the conspiracy theories now? Apple has been very public about the fact that they cooperate with law enforcement. The line in the sand they drew was in breaking or circumventing their encryption. Why? Because there is no way to break/circumvent solely for law enforcement and the first thing their competition would do is point that fact out. Apple isn't doing this because of some moral compunction. They are doing it because breaking encryption is bad business for them. The FBI is asking them to do something contrary to Apple's profit motive.
For a little more than the price of two Apple pencil styluses, I can get two Amazon Fire tablets, which would be so much more useful for me and my family.
If that is your use case then no argument. I'm not so concerned with the price but rather the fact that you just can't frakin' do anything genuinely useful with an Apple Pencil. I'm an engineer, an accountant, and I coach a sports team. Every one of those jobs has a LOT of paperwork that I could easily see doing on an iPad with an Apple Pencil but Apple in their infinite wisdom cannot be bothered to write the software to allow me to do it. They are worried about the three people doing graphics design rather than the millions who take notes and annotate and share documents. If Apple really was chasing the next big thing, it's right there. They just have to write the software to make it happen.
If Apple would write that software it would be VASTLY more valuable than any number of Amazon Fire tablets. I would happily hand them a pile of money to solve the problem of good digital note taking and document sharing. Sadly Microsoft actually seems to be closer with their Surface products though they haven't really nailed it either because they are thinking about it as an operating system expansion rather than from a document process standpoint.
it's true they weren't gutted under Obama, and the trend will show every president has been guilty lately.
Guilty of what? At worst they basically ignore NASA. NASA's budget fluctuates a bit but it's been a reasonable approximation of constant (adjusting for inflation) for the last 45 years. In 2014 dollars it has ranged between $14B and $24B for the last 45 years. Lowest was in 1980 and highest in 1991 in inflation adjusted dollars.
it's also true that under Obama NASA's budget was the lowest it had been since the 70s.
Not true in absolute or inflation adjusted dollars. In inflation adjusted 2014 dollars NASA's budget is higher than in the 1970s or the 1980s. As a percentage of the federal budget it is lower but that is more a reflection of how our budget exploded with deficit spending on other stuff. The budget during Obama's tenure was similar to slightly lower than under Bush but remember that Congress ultimately allocates the money so any budget changes really reflect the composition of Congress more than anything.
"If you see a stylus, they blew it.” - Steve Jobs, 2010
Yeah he said it. But the reality is that a stylus is fine PROVIDED it isn't used like a mouse. A stylus should be used for drawing only. And drawing letters for note taking falls into that category. Just drawing because that is all it is good for. If you couldn't do it with a real pencil then you shouldn't be able to do it with a stylus as a general proposition. The problem with them tends to be that application developers easily forget this and get tempted into using a stylus like a mouse (or worse a keyboard) and that NEVER works well.
A stylus can be hugely useful on a computer. I'd LOVE something that could be useful for taking notes and annotating documents digitally. But so far that corner of the market has been ignored and Apple is chasing a tiny group of artists and designers instead of the huge market for students and professionals.
Besides that, a $90 stylus that (unless apple forgot to announce it) has no way to attach to the ipad is overpriced and far too easily lost. How well do they really think that will go over? Once again, they ensure no one will use it.
Yeah I have several problems it the Apple Pencil. 1) Round so it easily rolls off tables if you set it down. They made it pretty instead of functional. 2) The iPad isn't designed with a place to store it when not in use rendering it clumsy to transport 3) Unless you are a fairly specific kind of artist (I'm not) the app support SUCKS. I'm an engineer and I can conceive of lots of uses for something like this but Apple isn't making it easy. 4) Far too expensive for something that is easy to loose and can't be stored easily 5) Did I mention the apps SUCK. Even for note taking which should be the most obvious thing in the world.
I also have beef with the iPads for similar reasons 1) Why are the icons stored in the same spacing as on an iPhone with WAY too much space in between 2) The apps are either redundant to my iPhone or SUCK for anything more useful like taking notes or doing engineering. 3) The cases are annoying and by and large suck. I really don't like the most common cases and Apple clearly thinks of cases and keyboards as an afterthought at best.
I'd love to get something like an iPad but they simply haven't bothered to work on anything that is a viable use case for me. They just supersized my iPhone and didn't really bother to take advantage of the larger form factor in any serious way.
Seems to me the AC was illustrating how some people seem willing to weaken some Rights, but not others, based on their own self-interest.
That's not what the AC did or if that was the intent it was a very poor effort. Gun rights are their own thing with their own challenges. Setting up a false equivalency between gun rights and privacy rights is not helpful to either one.
Ummm, evolution is absolutely a scientific theory.
It is a theory (meaning model), not a "theory" (meaning unproven). Evolution is only a "theory" in the syntactic sense as used to describe scientific arguments. That's why I used the quotes. People who argue against it argue that it is a "theory" using a different definition of the term theory to disingenuously argue that it somehow is still an open question as to whether it is real. In reality it is about as debatable as whether gravity exists.
What rights exactly are you referring to? What is the difference between the FBI reading a dead gunman's postal mail, and the FBI having Apple send an over the air update to unlock the dead gunman's phone.
If I really need to explain that to you please hand in your geek card. Breaking the encryption on the iPhone renders ALL encryption on the iPhone useless. It isn't just the government we are worried about here. If the US government can get into my correspondence then so can malware makers, foreign governments, thieves, etc. Any process used to open one iPhone effectively opens ALL iPhones. If I have to explain why that is bad then you need to go get some education before this discussion goes any further.
They already had full authority to seize all of the gunman's correspondence.
Authority != Ability. Furthermore there are civil rights issues in play here that extend FAR beyond the gunman's correspondence. I'm not worried particularly about the gunman. I'm worried about MY rights. We have limits on law enforcement because they have a LONG history of abusing their authority.
If he had a storage unit, would you oppose the FBI compelling them to hand over the key?
Him handing over a key to his storage locker does not render my storage locker accessible to thieves. Seriously? You don't see the difference?
By the time Obama arrived four years later, the decision would have been a nightmare to reverse, so he didn't try.
There is scant evidence that Obama wanted to revive the shuttle program. It was obvious by that point that it was a boondoggle and it was equally obvious that Congress was in no mood to increase NASA's budget. So the shuttle program (rightly) got the ax. Living without a manned program for a few years is more of an ego bruise than a real problem. I think in the long run it will be the right decision and I applaud both the Bush and Obama administrations for pushing to kill the shuttle program and to promote privately developed/funded launch vehicles. While I can make critiques of the handling of NASA, this was probably the best available decision.
Maybe start weaning yourself (and others) off 'news' and TV more generally - if you can't stop them from spreading outright nonsense, you can at least stop listening to it.
Pretending idiots don't exist will result in the idiots winning. Boycotts don't work unless they involve enough people to really make a difference and to get that you have to have already changed minds rendering the boycott pointless. Worthwhile to try to convince others to listen to credible news sources but tuning out without ensuring others are tuning out too is a Bad Idea.
We must violate the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens and take away their guns because a small minority of the population misuses them to commit crimes, including murder.
Are you seriously comparing a purpose built weapon designed explicitly to kill living things with a multi purpose computer/phone? Spare me the false equivalency. Nobody is arguing for or against gun control here but it isn't at all the same issue or the same logic.
We can't have a judicially overseen process to break the encryption on the personal devices of small minority terrorist or other criminals because it would infringe on the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens.
When you can design an encryption system that isn't rendered useless by the presence of a back door then your strawman might be credible. Unfortunately the laws of mathematics are pretty inflexible and nobody has figured out a way to put in a back door that only trusted parties have access to. Even if we completely trusted the government (which we don't) it still would be a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I have thousands of cases of evidence that QiGong is a very healthy thing.
No you do not. You certainly do not have an proper studies of such nonsense.
Assuming that QiGong is a mild exercise is idiotic. It is a martial art and healing system.
It is neither a martial art nor is there any evidence that it is a healing system. There is nothing martial about it. I've been involved in various martial arts my whole life and QuGong is exactly the sort of fraudlent crap that guilible people like yourself get sold. I'm betting you think tai chi is a fighting art too. Most of the so called martial arts are really stylized dance classes with a bit of mythology tacked on. Fun, maybe healthy but most don't teach anything about fighting. Just exercise, usually in funny looking costumes. If you want to see what a real martial art looks like, go to an MMA gym, a college wrestling room, or a jiu-jitsu class. Go see what the armed forces do. THOSE are martial arts.
As for it being a "healing system" put down the cool aid. It's been studied and there is NO evidence it has any effect on health aside from that of mild exercise. If you want me to believe you then present the evidence.
Medicine helps in situations where medicine helps ... e.g. a common cold. It does not really help when you have a slipped disc. Qi/Chi Gong does not help you either, but it might prevent getting a slipped disc.
Welcome to the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. We're done here.
I really wonder why intelligent people like you claim that. Hint: you can not double blind (neither the applyer of the needle nor the receiver know where he needle is placed) manual treat a human body.
Not true at all. You can simulate the needle placement with other stimulus. An electric shock can feel like a needle prick as long as the patient cannot see it. And there have been studies about the effectiveness of double blinding for acupuncture specifically.
You want to tell me that you have a study in the US that proves that 4 billion people outside of the USA are treated wrong
First off there are NOT 4 billion people receiving acupuncture so lets dispense with that nonsense right away. Acupuncture is used by a small percentage of the population - most of whom are inclined towards "alternative medicine" which for the most part is a PC term for quackery. Second, there are studies on the effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment and they mostly find that it is no better than placebo. So YES, I am saying EXACTLY that people are being treated wrong. People take all sorts of folk remedies all over the globe that have no evidence of efficacy.
Half the planet is using acupuncture and related medical treatment like Shiatsu and Thai Massage
More than half the planet also believes that there is an invisible man in the sky who created them and that they should obey despite there being precisely zero evidence for the existence of such a being. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't equal evidence. There are quite a number of treatments that insurance pays for for which the evidence of effectiveness is scant to non existent. They pay for it because the evidence there is limited evidence for or against its effectiveness. Most insurance in the US will not cover acupuncture under normal circumstances. Some insurance companies will turn a blind eye to it with a prescription from a doctor but this is the exception rather than the rule.
It is much more plausible that the US pharm. and health care industry simply is funding fraud studies and dismisses simple treatments because they rather like to sell pharmaceutics instead.
Only to an idiot who is inclined to believe conspiracy theories over scientific studies. Are you seriously arguing that modern medicine does not work despite the ample proof that it does.
Well of course it could be a coincidence, but it's a very freaky coincidence..
Or some other bit of your behavior other than a random conversation might have lead to that result. Some search term or search term related to a different search term. We rarely have conversations in a total (figurative) vacuum. It's pretty easy to forget about other things we've done that may be related or we may not realize are related. I'm not denying the possibility that Google really is listening in but I'd need a LOT more evidence than a single anecdote which in all likelihood is probably just either a coincidence or has an alternate explanation. Plus that seems like an incredibly economically inefficient way to serve ads. They really would have no way to know the context of any given conversation and selling the ad space would be a tough go.
However I paid a couple of hundred dollars for my phone, it's main and basic function is to make phone calls, so it's 100% wrong for phone calls to be eavesdropped on by the stock apps (i.e. Google apps) for the purpose of advertising-driven data harvesting.
Two points on that:
1) Smartphones are not devices whose primary purpose is to make phone calls. Never have been and never will be. They are handheld computers who just happen to also be able to make phone calls. If you just want something to make calls then you really don't need a smartphone. Good news is that phones who's real purpose is to make calls are a LOT cheaper.
2) The ENTIRE purpose of google making Android is for them to gather data about you and serve advertising to you. They developed it so that companies like Apple and Microsoft couldn't shut them out of the mobile ad market. If you expect Google to not "spy" on you with the intent to serve you ads then you are being naive. It might not be by listening in to a conversation but they definitely are watching your activity.
Which smart speaker would you trust the most?
The real answer is "None of the Above" but put a gun to my head and the answer is clearly Apple. Why? I trust their profit motive the most. Apple just wants to sell me more Apple products and actually has a not completely terrible record with regard to privacy. All the others want to sell data about me to third parties of unknown reliability. Amazon would be the next option, again because of their profit motive which is to sell me physical and digital stuff. Google and Facebook I don't trust at all. They are advertising companies start to finish and I have no interest in cooperating with that.
I can't see anyone wanting facebook having a microphone in their home.
No worse than Google, Amazon, etc. Honestly I don't really trust any of them though I will agree that I trust Facebook the least of the big tech firms. By a lot.
There also is the fact that I don't have any use for this thinly disguised spy devices. They strike me as a solution looking for a problem. I don't use Siri on my phone so it's unclear why I would be interested in wiring my house with another service I won't use that might be spying on me to boot.
Without self-driving cars Uber is dead.
There is no reason to believe that even with self driving cars Uber will ever achieve profitability. Honestly I'm kind of astonished they have managed to get the funding they have because they haven't shown any credible path to profitability that I am aware of.
They are not sufficiently profitable with regular rides to service their debt.
And somehow we are to believe that they will beat their well financed competition in developing them? Self driving cars will require tens of billions at minimum to develop (probably hundreds of billions) and decades to get to a state where they can be sold to or used by the general public. Uber is losing money at an almost record setting clip and we're expected to believe they can seriously compete with Google and GM and Ford? All of which are profitable, have billions in cash, have proven business models, and most of whom have WAY more experience developing cars and related technologies than Uber.
Honestly I think Uber is doomed. The only question is when. They are well financed but it's not clear how they ever get to profitability. And no Amazon is not an obviously good analog here.
There have been several eerie instances where Google auto-suggested a search item (based on the first letter or first few letters) that has just been talked about on the phone.
And how do you know this is not just coincidence? If you talked about it it's credible to believe that other people did so as well.
No, it was not a common search term, no it did not make sense based on location, past search history, browsing or whatever. If those weren't just very weird coincidences (which I find hard to believe), then the only logical explanation was that Google was analyzing the voice conversation.
How do you know it wasn't common? To be honest I'm HIGHLY dubious that Google is listening to your conversations. While I cannot deny that its a possibility it doesn't make a lot of sense that they could do this without it becoming public knowledge. SO many people would have to keep it a secret that I just don't really buy it.
Of course if you use Android always remember that Google makes their money from advertising so any decisions they make will be through that lens. The more information they have about you the more effective they will be at selling advertising so use Android and any other Google products with that in mind. Not saying be paranoid but be aware.
Sweet; Arizona has downsized and is now a city!
Considering that nearly 2/3 the state's population lives in the metro Phoenix area (4.5million out of 7 million) it's actually pretty close to being a factual statement.
Nerds, please explain how that is an organ.
If you aren't a nerd yourself then slashdot isn't the place for you. Go figure it out yourself.
maybe they did demonstrate their claims using the most empirical method of all: "Does it work?"
If it actually works it should be straight forward to actually prove it. Placebos "work" (sometimes) but we don't rely on them for treatment for good reasons.
Everyone who practices Chi Gong or other internal arts knows that ... since millennia.
Oh do they now? Are you seriously claiming that QiGong is anything more than a mild form of exercise? In spite of the fact that there is little evidence to support its efficacy for any specific health benefit.
You know what they call alternative medicine that is shown to actually work? Medicine.
Acupuncture is not based on 'points' on meridians.
Acupuncture is pretty much not based on anything at all. Certainly not based on scientific evidence. The evidence regarding its efficacy is thin and it clearly is being used to "treat" far too many conditions for which there is no evidence that it has any effect. There appears to be some evidence that it can help certain pain conditions (though this is still being evaluated) but the mechanism of action is unclear and the clinical practice guidelines are inconsistent to put it mildly. The NIH has been researching acupuncture and until they can show with appropriate studies evidence of effectiveness beyond placebo and a mechanism of action acupuncture should be regarded with skepticism.
If layman do a 'double blind' study it is most likely that both needles are at the wrong point :)
Most double blind studies of acupuncture to date show that it is nothing but a placebo under most circumstances and for most conditions.
I don't buy the argument that unlocking one phone is tantamount to a backdoor to all phones.
Then you don't understand the technology at work. With any encryption if you break it on one device you have de-facto broken it on every device that shares that encryption system. That's how it works like it or not. It is analogous to the act of creating a key. If you hand a key to a third party (even a trusted one) that key can (and probably will) be copied without your knowledge or consent. If there is a backdoor with a weak or nonexistent key there is no way to hide it so that only the "good" guys have access.
He obviously had the PR department go over this with him.
Of course he did. That doesn't mean is he wrong. He is absolutely correct that any tool created to circumvent encryption WILL be used in ways that were not intended or authorized. Including by law enforcement which has a LONG history of abusing their authority.
The FBI and Apple both chose to appeal to the public. Apple inserted privacy and security language in their response, and won. That sounds great except next time the request won't be public so you won't even know how it turns out, and Apple will be just fine with that, because the illusion is maintained.
Oh so you are going with the conspiracy theories now? Apple has been very public about the fact that they cooperate with law enforcement. The line in the sand they drew was in breaking or circumventing their encryption. Why? Because there is no way to break/circumvent solely for law enforcement and the first thing their competition would do is point that fact out. Apple isn't doing this because of some moral compunction. They are doing it because breaking encryption is bad business for them. The FBI is asking them to do something contrary to Apple's profit motive.
For a little more than the price of two Apple pencil styluses, I can get two Amazon Fire tablets, which would be so much more useful for me and my family.
If that is your use case then no argument. I'm not so concerned with the price but rather the fact that you just can't frakin' do anything genuinely useful with an Apple Pencil. I'm an engineer, an accountant, and I coach a sports team. Every one of those jobs has a LOT of paperwork that I could easily see doing on an iPad with an Apple Pencil but Apple in their infinite wisdom cannot be bothered to write the software to allow me to do it. They are worried about the three people doing graphics design rather than the millions who take notes and annotate and share documents. If Apple really was chasing the next big thing, it's right there. They just have to write the software to make it happen.
If Apple would write that software it would be VASTLY more valuable than any number of Amazon Fire tablets. I would happily hand them a pile of money to solve the problem of good digital note taking and document sharing. Sadly Microsoft actually seems to be closer with their Surface products though they haven't really nailed it either because they are thinking about it as an operating system expansion rather than from a document process standpoint.
it's true they weren't gutted under Obama, and the trend will show every president has been guilty lately.
Guilty of what? At worst they basically ignore NASA. NASA's budget fluctuates a bit but it's been a reasonable approximation of constant (adjusting for inflation) for the last 45 years. In 2014 dollars it has ranged between $14B and $24B for the last 45 years. Lowest was in 1980 and highest in 1991 in inflation adjusted dollars.
it's also true that under Obama NASA's budget was the lowest it had been since the 70s.
Not true in absolute or inflation adjusted dollars. In inflation adjusted 2014 dollars NASA's budget is higher than in the 1970s or the 1980s. As a percentage of the federal budget it is lower but that is more a reflection of how our budget exploded with deficit spending on other stuff. The budget during Obama's tenure was similar to slightly lower than under Bush but remember that Congress ultimately allocates the money so any budget changes really reflect the composition of Congress more than anything.
"If you see a stylus, they blew it.” - Steve Jobs, 2010
Yeah he said it. But the reality is that a stylus is fine PROVIDED it isn't used like a mouse. A stylus should be used for drawing only. And drawing letters for note taking falls into that category. Just drawing because that is all it is good for. If you couldn't do it with a real pencil then you shouldn't be able to do it with a stylus as a general proposition. The problem with them tends to be that application developers easily forget this and get tempted into using a stylus like a mouse (or worse a keyboard) and that NEVER works well.
A stylus can be hugely useful on a computer. I'd LOVE something that could be useful for taking notes and annotating documents digitally. But so far that corner of the market has been ignored and Apple is chasing a tiny group of artists and designers instead of the huge market for students and professionals.
Schools should not invest in an eco system with a single vendor for both hardware and software while there are more open alternatives.
You mean like Microsoft + Intel? In principle I agree with you but good luck getting a practical setup without a substantial amount of vendor lock in.
Besides that, a $90 stylus that (unless apple forgot to announce it) has no way to attach to the ipad is overpriced and far too easily lost. How well do they really think that will go over? Once again, they ensure no one will use it.
Yeah I have several problems it the Apple Pencil.
1) Round so it easily rolls off tables if you set it down. They made it pretty instead of functional.
2) The iPad isn't designed with a place to store it when not in use rendering it clumsy to transport
3) Unless you are a fairly specific kind of artist (I'm not) the app support SUCKS. I'm an engineer and I can conceive of lots of uses for something like this but Apple isn't making it easy.
4) Far too expensive for something that is easy to loose and can't be stored easily
5) Did I mention the apps SUCK. Even for note taking which should be the most obvious thing in the world.
I also have beef with the iPads for similar reasons
1) Why are the icons stored in the same spacing as on an iPhone with WAY too much space in between
2) The apps are either redundant to my iPhone or SUCK for anything more useful like taking notes or doing engineering.
3) The cases are annoying and by and large suck. I really don't like the most common cases and Apple clearly thinks of cases and keyboards as an afterthought at best.
I'd love to get something like an iPad but they simply haven't bothered to work on anything that is a viable use case for me. They just supersized my iPhone and didn't really bother to take advantage of the larger form factor in any serious way.
What happened to Slashdot? I thought this was a website for nerds.
FAR too many of them have left. Slashdot doesn't have much geek cred left.
Seems to me the AC was illustrating how some people seem willing to weaken some Rights, but not others, based on their own self-interest.
That's not what the AC did or if that was the intent it was a very poor effort. Gun rights are their own thing with their own challenges. Setting up a false equivalency between gun rights and privacy rights is not helpful to either one.
Ummm, evolution is absolutely a scientific theory.
It is a theory (meaning model), not a "theory" (meaning unproven). Evolution is only a "theory" in the syntactic sense as used to describe scientific arguments. That's why I used the quotes. People who argue against it argue that it is a "theory" using a different definition of the term theory to disingenuously argue that it somehow is still an open question as to whether it is real. In reality it is about as debatable as whether gravity exists.
What rights exactly are you referring to? What is the difference between the FBI reading a dead gunman's postal mail, and the FBI having Apple send an over the air update to unlock the dead gunman's phone.
If I really need to explain that to you please hand in your geek card. Breaking the encryption on the iPhone renders ALL encryption on the iPhone useless. It isn't just the government we are worried about here. If the US government can get into my correspondence then so can malware makers, foreign governments, thieves, etc. Any process used to open one iPhone effectively opens ALL iPhones. If I have to explain why that is bad then you need to go get some education before this discussion goes any further.
They already had full authority to seize all of the gunman's correspondence.
Authority != Ability. Furthermore there are civil rights issues in play here that extend FAR beyond the gunman's correspondence. I'm not worried particularly about the gunman. I'm worried about MY rights. We have limits on law enforcement because they have a LONG history of abusing their authority.
If he had a storage unit, would you oppose the FBI compelling them to hand over the key?
Him handing over a key to his storage locker does not render my storage locker accessible to thieves. Seriously? You don't see the difference?
By the time Obama arrived four years later, the decision would have been a nightmare to reverse, so he didn't try.
There is scant evidence that Obama wanted to revive the shuttle program. It was obvious by that point that it was a boondoggle and it was equally obvious that Congress was in no mood to increase NASA's budget. So the shuttle program (rightly) got the ax. Living without a manned program for a few years is more of an ego bruise than a real problem. I think in the long run it will be the right decision and I applaud both the Bush and Obama administrations for pushing to kill the shuttle program and to promote privately developed/funded launch vehicles. While I can make critiques of the handling of NASA, this was probably the best available decision.
Maybe start weaning yourself (and others) off 'news' and TV more generally - if you can't stop them from spreading outright nonsense, you can at least stop listening to it.
Pretending idiots don't exist will result in the idiots winning. Boycotts don't work unless they involve enough people to really make a difference and to get that you have to have already changed minds rendering the boycott pointless. Worthwhile to try to convince others to listen to credible news sources but tuning out without ensuring others are tuning out too is a Bad Idea.
We must violate the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens and take away their guns because a small minority of the population misuses them to commit crimes, including murder.
Are you seriously comparing a purpose built weapon designed explicitly to kill living things with a multi purpose computer/phone? Spare me the false equivalency. Nobody is arguing for or against gun control here but it isn't at all the same issue or the same logic.
We can't have a judicially overseen process to break the encryption on the personal devices of small minority terrorist or other criminals because it would infringe on the Rights of peaceful, law abiding citizens.
When you can design an encryption system that isn't rendered useless by the presence of a back door then your strawman might be credible. Unfortunately the laws of mathematics are pretty inflexible and nobody has figured out a way to put in a back door that only trusted parties have access to. Even if we completely trusted the government (which we don't) it still would be a bad idea.
Did I get it right?
Not even a little bit.