Oh, really? So you admit you have magic bracelets, and thus that magic exists? We got you now, Mr. Science-guy!
Heh. I've known a number of scientists who do magic as a hobby. All of them have talked about being bemused and saddened by the number of people who refuse to accept that they're being fooled by trickery, and insist that the "magic show" was real even when the magician tries to deny the reality.
It doesn't help to say that they can show people how the trick is done. The believers won't pay attention, and might actively interfere with the explanation, to maintain their beliefs. Explaining takes time, and requires the cooperative attention of the audience. Schools are quite likely to have the same kind of problems if their science teachers try to explain the trickery behind pseudo-science.
It's an interesting demo of how belief in magic and pseudo-science can maintain a hold on willing victims. Even when the trickster wants to be open and honest about it.
... this is not spying, it is a propaganda campaign.
"Yawn" indeed. What baffles me is how anyone think this differs from any other propaganda campaigns throughout human history. It is because it's "on a computer", which means that most people will forget all precedent and pretend that it's something new?
In particular, the mass media here and everywhere else has always cooperated with the wishes of the people in power. That's part of the price of staying in business, regardless of what your local laws (or Constitutions) might say. The distribution of information is rapidly moving online, so of course the same medium becomes part of the distribution system for propaganda. Every government (and every marketing organization) in the world is hard at work trying to control what we can read here.
Why are we pretending that this is somehow new and unprecedented?
It has always been true that we need to learn to be skeptical of essentially everything anyone tells us. People are always trying to trick us into believing things for their own profit, and most people don't care if those things are true, only whether they can profit from others believing them.
Yeah, this is a standard cop-out, but if you think about it briefly, it's rather illogical. We only get one government; we couldn't possibly all deserve exactly that government.
In fact, most of us don't "deserve" the government we've got. The political system (mostly bought and paid for by the one or two percent that we hear about but rarely have even met) is to a great degree "fixed", and isn't anything that most of us deserve.
Not to mention all of its victims in other parts of the world who have had no say whatsoever in the makeup of our government.
That's a good idea in general, considering its history of problems.
Maybe what we need is a push to persuade browser makers to link to perl and python implementations. Those are both much better languages for the purposes that JS was invented, and they're both completely open-source.
Actually, the right way to do it would be to replace all the embedded browsers' languages with tools for communicating efficiently with an arbitrary language plugin. Then we could use any programming language we like, including languages that haven't been developed yet. But what are the chances that we could persuade all the major browser makers to implement something as (conceptually;-) simple as that?
I'm getting a robotic voice reading the stories. I'm hoping this is their April Fool's joke because if this is a serious new feature then it's idiotic.
Well, I wouldn't call it idiotic. It could be the start of a useful feature for the visually impaired. What seems to be missing is a way to disable it. I've poked around a bit, and didn't find any controls. It has the usual sound level widget, which works for the current window, but when I refresh or open a new discussion window/tab, the sound is back up where it was.
I dont understand how this could be patented if it is already a thing, just on a different piece of hardware.
It's because it includes the phrase "on a computer".
You see, in addition to their computational uses, computers also have a "human memory erasure" capability. When you bring a computer near humans working with any old technology, all memory of that technology is erased, and the humans have to learn about its use from scratch.
This is a well-known phenomenon in the field of patent law, and is a major source of income for patent lawyers. And for the companies that manufacture the old technology, which becomes patentable when in proximity to a computer.
And now, of course, we know MS thinks nothing of perusing private emails. Although this may be allowed in the fine print of the TOS, it's not the part of the advertised-image MS projects, and MS's repeated defense that doing so was within the law won't help it on the ethical front.
This is hardly anything new. Remember a few years back, when there was a bit of a fuss when people caught msn.com using customers' photos of their children (taken from email and web files "hosted" on msn.com servers) in their advertising? MS's first reaction to criticism was to point out that this was totally legal, since their TOS said specifically that any files stored on one of their machines became the property of Microsoft and msn.com. They were apparently surprised when people were upset by this.
The PR was so bad then that within a few weeks, their reps announced that they had stopped the practice. Some months later, though, people were pointing out that the language was still in their TOS doc.
And, as at that time, MS could logically point out that they aren't looking at any files owned by customers. By uploading email or other files to their servers, customers are legally assigning ownership of the files to MS. So MS is reading its own email files, not customers' email.
Sorry if this upsets you, but this is how US law on such things seems to work. Unless you've got a few spare million or so dollars to challenge it in court, in which case a decade or so from now the court might decide in your favor. Why don't you take it on as a project, and let the rest of us know how it works out? You'd be doing us all a big favor (if you win).
We have to do this, and more, so much more, to keep us safe from the terrists who hate us for our freedom.
And also because our tanks are in their backyard.
Nah; we don't much bother with the tanks these days. Instead, we keep our drones overhead. They're a lot cheaper, and their operators are far from the scene. And if the terrists should shoot one down, we have lots more to send to their wedding parties.
Ratio of integers is what makes it rational. Since those digits wouldn't be integers, it wouldn't be rational.
Oh, c'mon; any first-year math student can tell you how to set up a base-pi system so that the digits represent integers. You start by using the usual Greek letter pi (which/. can't display, right?;-). Then you simply observe that, being the usual real-number field, we can divide our base number pi by itself, and define the shorthand symbol "1" to represent the result. After defining addition in the usual way, we define the shorthand symbol "2" to represent 1+1. And so on. Similarly, we subtract the base from itself, and define "0" as the shorthand symbol for the result. A couple of our earliest theorems demonstrate that 0 is the identity number for addition, and when we've defined multiplication, we also prove that 1 is the identity for that operation.
Actually, the only difference between this and our usual system is that we no longer call 10 our base; that term is reserved for pi.
Some years ago, I read an even more abstruse definition of the real numbers. It started with the numbers e and pi, and had a couple of axioms (which I've forgotten) defining their basic properties. From these, the writer derived two numbers that were called "0" and "1", and everything else followed from that.
Mathematicians often like to come up with abstruse examples like these, just for the fun of it. But such exercises can come in handy at times, when you are dealing with people who are arguing for an "improved" scheme for something. If you can show that it's equivalent to the usual scheme, you can produce the same sort of argument showing how to derive the usual symbols and axioms, and from then on you're home free.
The same approach has been used to explain why the US has in fact been "on the metric system" since the 1880s. Back then, the US Standards Bureau (whatever it was called that year) redefined all the usual "English" units of measurement in metric terms, on the grounds that at the time, the repository in Paris had the most precise system of measurements available. Thus, the inch was redefined as 2.54 cm exactly, and similarly for all the others. Since then, the legal basis of all units of measurement in the US has been the metric units. We just have an "extended" metric system that has a lot of other units that aren't mentioned in the ISO's standards documents.
And the metric system has been legal in the US for all purposes since some time in the 1840s, by an edict of Congress. So we don't need to "go metric"; we did that long ago. We just need to use the basic metric units more, rather than those goofy (2.54x? WTF??) units that some of us like so much.
Is the parenthesis part of the emoticon?!!! or is your EMOTICON MOUTHLESS?!?!?!
Heh. I've noticed that both are quite common, and depending on aesthetic ideals about such things, one or the other is likely to offend most readers. So I try to use both of them, preferably close together.
In any case, the ";-)" one isn't mouthless, since if you lean your head to the left, you can clearly see that the paren is the mouth. Adding the left paren not only gives balanced parens, but also gives the emoticon a forehead. Apparently it's bald, but what can ya do?
One fun part of all this agonizing is that if you include both parens (perhaps in a misguided sense to satisfy picky editing software;-), the rendering software often converts the ";-)" to an image, but leaves the "(" as is, producing an unclosed open paren.
Ya can't win at such games; the only winning move is to refuse to play. Or maybe to throw a monkey wrench into both attitudes.
We already have a calendar system "For the Information Age": the second counter. Actually, of course, we have a whole series of them, but they differ only in the zero "epoch" second, so translation between them is trivial. The most widely-used such counter is the unix/POSIX time() value, perhaps augmented with a decimal point and a fractional second value.
This "calendar system" has a property that all the others lack: simple arithmetic operations work with it. And once you have the second for some event, there are library routines that can translate it to a human-readable form in any other calendar that you like.
So feel free to invent other interesting calendars; we software types won't be offended. We'll just ask you to be very precise in how you define your calendar, so we can write the routines to produce your calendar from ours. Of course, we'll expect you to pay us for this unnecessary labor, but it only has to be done once for each calendar. And maybe one of your calendars can be the human-readable calendar that supplants the silly Christian calendar, relegating it to use in scheduling your religious holidays.
Just don't ask us to use your calendar (or any other that's not a single number that can be used to any precision) inside our OSs or libraries. The "Information Age" needs a calendar system that works using ordinary real numbers, and aside from the question of when the zero was, we have that already.
(Actually, there's also the slowly-growing problem of different clock speeds caused by relativistic effects, but that's probably a discussion for a much more technical forum than this one.;-)
Oscillococcinum, one of the most common of these quack remedies, typically comes in 200C dilution. A C dilution is a 1/100th dilution, so 200C is 1/(100^200) dilution rate.
Of course, there are also a number of products that use small numbers of X (1/10th) dilutions as well. The 3X-6X dilutions do result in a product that contains the active ingredient.
Funny example: Recently a (real;-) doctor recommended a particular plant extract to my wife, to treat a minor skin condition that caused major itching and reddening. She found it at Whole Foods, and I noticed that it was labelled as "homeopathic", with a 1X dilution. So it was actually 10% the active ingredient.
It actually worked quite well; the problem disappeared in a few days and hasn't recurred. Checking online showed that it's one of many "natural" ingredients that can be sole OTC, as long as no specific medical claims are made.
So we might ask why they labelled it "homeopathic" when it has such a high fraction of active ingredient. Our guess is "marketing": The company that packages it wants to sell to the not-insignificant fraction of the population that believes in homeopathic cures. The doctors probably just grin, knowing that it's meaningless, but also knowing that a good number of traditional "folk" remedies are actually useful, as long as the problem is minor and precisely-measured medicine isn't required.
Actually, years ago I was diagnosed with chronic "dry skin" by a doctor, who recommended olive oil. He did explain that it really isn't a medicine at all; it just slows down evaporation and lets the skin retain more of the water it gets from deeper tissues. It worked well enough that he said real medication wasn't needed. I've used it off and on ever since, mostly in winter when indoor air is typically very dry, and it works quite well. I wonder if such plant oils are ever labelled "homeopathic", perhaps at a 0X "dilution factor".;-)
(That doctor also joked about it being a medicine he learned from his Italian grandmother.)
Now before you say it isn't me paying for it, it is the insurance company, it is me- the employer being forced to give you access to that insurance company. The insurance i am forced to provide specifically provides contraception/abortion coverage because of law.
And here we have someone ("sumdumass";-) stating the real behind-the-scenes issue at hand: Employers want to be the ones who control what sort of health care their employees get. In particular, employers want the right to deny contraceptives to their female employees. In fact, they do to a great degree currently have that "right". This discussion is about whether a minor part of it can be taken away from the employers and handed over to the affected employees to decide on their own.
This isn't a religious issue at all, because corporations don't have religions (or morals or ethics or...;-); they only have products and sales and profits and losses and employees and owners and other such non-religious (but very business-related) things.
The real issue is the desire for company control over their employees lives, up to and including when or whether employees can have children.
The real solution would be to end the perverse American connection of health care to employment. That's the main reason for the expensive disaster that is American health care. It's tied to a part of the culture that is only concerned with profit, and whose usual approach to an employee with a serious health problem is to fire them. As long as this scheme is continued, things will continue to be as screwed up as to lead to discussions like we're having today.
MS, Google, Yahoo, all free service, I don't think there is an expectation for privacy.
Or, more generally, anyone who stores anything on a commercial server and expects privacy is a fool.
Yes, this is especially true with "free" services, which must be profitable or they won't exist for long. But one should generally assume that any data that's ever been on any company's machines will be saved (at least backed up) and available indefinitely to any company employee or customer who's willing to pay. Anything else just shows a total misunderstanding of how these companies work.
Actually, some of the jobs I've had has involved maintaining and troubleshooting the email systems. I've had many occasions where as part of fixing a reported problem, I subtly let the people involved know that, yes, I can see the content of all their messages, so they might want to be a bit more careful about what they put in writing. In a few cases, they've even thanked me for this extra warning.
I've found that a good way of explaining this is by telling people that email isn't like a postal letter; it's really more like a post card. Everything is visible to the people who handle the delivery process. Usually they won't read anything, but they can, and with email it's so easy that I often have to carefully avoid reading the content. And in a few cases, I've had to dig into the content itself to figure out why the delivery system messed it up. (I don't like to do this, but some email software does "interesting" things to the content, and the damage can only be fixed by looking at the text itself.)
And, as others have said, with a free service you should understand that you're not the customer, you're the product. Or rather, the content of what you're sending and receiving is their product, which they sell to their actual customers.
I think the OC is also new to trademarks. If one wants to maintain a trademark, one cannot allow anyone else to "dilute" it.
Um, if that's true, then why didn't the judge cancel Fluke's trademark on this color scheme? As others have pointed out, most (but not quite all) of the multimeters on the US market use the same or a very similar color scheme. I did a quick check of my basement and garage work areas, found three multimeters with dark bodies and yellow edges, none of them a Fluke. (A 4th in a kitchen drawer has a red edge.) The fact that this color scheme is so widely used should have automatically wiped out Fluke's trademark claim.
Anyone know why they succeeded in this one challenge? Why this victim, and not all the other "infringers"?
You know who reviews open source code seriously? Fucking nobody.
Oh, I dunno 'bout dat. I recall a few years ago, getting an informative email from one of djb's folks, telling me how to exploit an open-source program that I was using in the software behind a web site that I was responsible for. I ran their test, dug into the code and fixed the problem (and several similar problems in other parts of the code), and sent them a nice letter thanking them for their help. I also forwarded their email and my patches to the author of the program, but I didn't hear back from him.
This only fails to qualify as "seriously" if you dismiss all of academia as not serious. In reality, that's where you'll find most of the people who take security seriously. You don't much find them in "industry" (as the summary puts it), for management reasons that are well-understood by pretty much anyone who has ever tried to get security problems fixed in a corporate-management environment.
How do we know this isn't an NSA front organization?
Maybe it's time for yet another reminder that the entire Internet can be viewed as a "front" for the US military, via (D)ARPA, the 100% military-funded organization that paid for almost all of the Internet's early development. (Yes, a bit of money did come from independent sources, mostly in academia, but this was < 1% of the funding until around 1985 or so.)
What makes this irrelevant is that the Internet's standards and almost all of its low-level code have long been open-source, and easily available online. This fact was the main reason it won out over OSI. In the 1980s, I worked on a number of projects that were primarily aimed at OSI, but there were delays caused by all the paperwork required for purchase orders for the official standards, and even longer waits for copies of the libraries and compliance-testing code, so while waiting, we built some prototypes on top of IP. By the time all the purchasing bureaucracy gave us what we needed, the IP version was working, so our clients took that, and the rest is history.;-)
So even if the NSA is funding this work, if the code is all open (and we can compile it ourselves), that doesn't much matter. The problem then is the proprietary code that will be piled on top of it. History tells us that this will continue to be secret, and the major source of security problems. Code designed to collect "marketing" data about customers is inherently easy for people interested in other kinds of spying to take over and redirect for their own purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, really? So you admit you have magic bracelets, and thus that magic exists? We got you now, Mr. Science-guy!
Heh. I've known a number of scientists who do magic as a hobby. All of them have talked about being bemused and saddened by the number of people who refuse to accept that they're being fooled by trickery, and insist that the "magic show" was real even when the magician tries to deny the reality.
It doesn't help to say that they can show people how the trick is done. The believers won't pay attention, and might actively interfere with the explanation, to maintain their beliefs. Explaining takes time, and requires the cooperative attention of the audience. Schools are quite likely to have the same kind of problems if their science teachers try to explain the trickery behind pseudo-science.
It's an interesting demo of how belief in magic and pseudo-science can maintain a hold on willing victims. Even when the trickster wants to be open and honest about it.
What does Snowden have to do with this? I haven't seen his name associated with it before.
This isn't criticism; maybe he is involved; I don't know. Can you give a few cites that explain the link?
... this is not spying, it is a propaganda campaign.
"Yawn" indeed. What baffles me is how anyone think this differs from any other propaganda campaigns throughout human history. It is because it's "on a computer", which means that most people will forget all precedent and pretend that it's something new?
In particular, the mass media here and everywhere else has always cooperated with the wishes of the people in power. That's part of the price of staying in business, regardless of what your local laws (or Constitutions) might say. The distribution of information is rapidly moving online, so of course the same medium becomes part of the distribution system for propaganda. Every government (and every marketing organization) in the world is hard at work trying to control what we can read here.
Why are we pretending that this is somehow new and unprecedented?
It has always been true that we need to learn to be skeptical of essentially everything anyone tells us. People are always trying to trick us into believing things for their own profit, and most people don't care if those things are true, only whether they can profit from others believing them.
So yeah: "Yawn."
But we get the government we deserve ...
Yeah, this is a standard cop-out, but if you think about it briefly, it's rather illogical. We only get one government; we couldn't possibly all deserve exactly that government.
In fact, most of us don't "deserve" the government we've got. The political system (mostly bought and paid for by the one or two percent that we hear about but rarely have even met) is to a great degree "fixed", and isn't anything that most of us deserve.
Not to mention all of its victims in other parts of the world who have had no say whatsoever in the makeup of our government.
So what are you doing to change this? ;-)
Stop using JavaScript
That's a good idea in general, considering its history of problems.
Maybe what we need is a push to persuade browser makers to link to perl and python implementations. Those are both much better languages for the purposes that JS was invented, and they're both completely open-source.
Actually, the right way to do it would be to replace all the embedded browsers' languages with tools for communicating efficiently with an arbitrary language plugin. Then we could use any programming language we like, including languages that haven't been developed yet. But what are the chances that we could persuade all the major browser makers to implement something as (conceptually ;-) simple as that?
Heh. It's been a couple of years since I've had a RickRoll. Thanks for the memory!
I'm getting a robotic voice reading the stories. I'm hoping this is their April Fool's joke because if this is a serious new feature then it's idiotic.
Well, I wouldn't call it idiotic. It could be the start of a useful feature for the visually impaired. What seems to be missing is a way to disable it. I've poked around a bit, and didn't find any controls. It has the usual sound level widget, which works for the current window, but when I refresh or open a new discussion window/tab, the sound is back up where it was.
Anyone know how to turn it off?
I dont understand how this could be patented if it is already a thing, just on a different piece of hardware.
It's because it includes the phrase "on a computer".
You see, in addition to their computational uses, computers also have a "human memory erasure" capability. When you bring a computer near humans working with any old technology, all memory of that technology is erased, and the humans have to learn about its use from scratch.
This is a well-known phenomenon in the field of patent law, and is a major source of income for patent lawyers. And for the companies that manufacture the old technology, which becomes patentable when in proximity to a computer.
Another fantastically insightful post without an author to attribute it to. -- Why are all the good posts submitted as --AC?
Because they don't want to lose their jobs, etc., etc. ;-)
And now, of course, we know MS thinks nothing of perusing private emails. Although this may be allowed in the fine print of the TOS, it's not the part of the advertised-image MS projects, and MS's repeated defense that doing so was within the law won't help it on the ethical front.
This is hardly anything new. Remember a few years back, when there was a bit of a fuss when people caught msn.com using customers' photos of their children (taken from email and web files "hosted" on msn.com servers) in their advertising? MS's first reaction to criticism was to point out that this was totally legal, since their TOS said specifically that any files stored on one of their machines became the property of Microsoft and msn.com. They were apparently surprised when people were upset by this.
The PR was so bad then that within a few weeks, their reps announced that they had stopped the practice. Some months later, though, people were pointing out that the language was still in their TOS doc.
And, as at that time, MS could logically point out that they aren't looking at any files owned by customers. By uploading email or other files to their servers, customers are legally assigning ownership of the files to MS. So MS is reading its own email files, not customers' email.
Sorry if this upsets you, but this is how US law on such things seems to work. Unless you've got a few spare million or so dollars to challenge it in court, in which case a decade or so from now the court might decide in your favor. Why don't you take it on as a project, and let the rest of us know how it works out? You'd be doing us all a big favor (if you win).
So does anyone know if Senator Ted Kennedy is still on the no-fly list?
We have to do this, and more, so much more, to keep us safe from the terrists who hate us for our freedom.
And also because our tanks are in their backyard.
Nah; we don't much bother with the tanks these days. Instead, we keep our drones overhead. They're a lot cheaper, and their operators are far from the scene. And if the terrists should shoot one down, we have lots more to send to their wedding parties.
Ratio of integers is what makes it rational. Since those digits wouldn't be integers, it wouldn't be rational.
Oh, c'mon; any first-year math student can tell you how to set up a base-pi system so that the digits represent integers. You start by using the usual Greek letter pi (which /. can't display, right? ;-). Then you simply observe that, being the usual real-number field, we can divide our base number pi by itself, and define the shorthand symbol "1" to represent the result. After defining addition in the usual way, we define the shorthand symbol "2" to represent 1+1. And so on. Similarly, we subtract the base from itself, and define "0" as the shorthand symbol for the result. A couple of our earliest theorems demonstrate that 0 is the identity number for addition, and when we've defined multiplication, we also prove that 1 is the identity for that operation.
Actually, the only difference between this and our usual system is that we no longer call 10 our base; that term is reserved for pi.
Some years ago, I read an even more abstruse definition of the real numbers. It started with the numbers e and pi, and had a couple of axioms (which I've forgotten) defining their basic properties. From these, the writer derived two numbers that were called "0" and "1", and everything else followed from that.
Mathematicians often like to come up with abstruse examples like these, just for the fun of it. But such exercises can come in handy at times, when you are dealing with people who are arguing for an "improved" scheme for something. If you can show that it's equivalent to the usual scheme, you can produce the same sort of argument showing how to derive the usual symbols and axioms, and from then on you're home free.
The same approach has been used to explain why the US has in fact been "on the metric system" since the 1880s. Back then, the US Standards Bureau (whatever it was called that year) redefined all the usual "English" units of measurement in metric terms, on the grounds that at the time, the repository in Paris had the most precise system of measurements available. Thus, the inch was redefined as 2.54 cm exactly, and similarly for all the others. Since then, the legal basis of all units of measurement in the US has been the metric units. We just have an "extended" metric system that has a lot of other units that aren't mentioned in the ISO's standards documents.
And the metric system has been legal in the US for all purposes since some time in the 1840s, by an edict of Congress. So we don't need to "go metric"; we did that long ago. We just need to use the basic metric units more, rather than those goofy (2.54x? WTF??) units that some of us like so much.
Is the parenthesis part of the emoticon?!!! or is your EMOTICON MOUTHLESS?!?!?!
Heh. I've noticed that both are quite common, and depending on aesthetic ideals about such things, one or the other is likely to offend most readers. So I try to use both of them, preferably close together.
In any case, the ";-)" one isn't mouthless, since if you lean your head to the left, you can clearly see that the paren is the mouth. Adding the left paren not only gives balanced parens, but also gives the emoticon a forehead. Apparently it's bald, but what can ya do?
One fun part of all this agonizing is that if you include both parens (perhaps in a misguided sense to satisfy picky editing software ;-), the rendering software often converts the ";-)" to an image, but leaves the "(" as is, producing an unclosed open paren.
Ya can't win at such games; the only winning move is to refuse to play. Or maybe to throw a monkey wrench into both attitudes.
We already have a calendar system "For the Information Age": the second counter. Actually, of course, we have a whole series of them, but they differ only in the zero "epoch" second, so translation between them is trivial. The most widely-used such counter is the unix/POSIX time() value, perhaps augmented with a decimal point and a fractional second value.
This "calendar system" has a property that all the others lack: simple arithmetic operations work with it. And once you have the second for some event, there are library routines that can translate it to a human-readable form in any other calendar that you like.
So feel free to invent other interesting calendars; we software types won't be offended. We'll just ask you to be very precise in how you define your calendar, so we can write the routines to produce your calendar from ours. Of course, we'll expect you to pay us for this unnecessary labor, but it only has to be done once for each calendar. And maybe one of your calendars can be the human-readable calendar that supplants the silly Christian calendar, relegating it to use in scheduling your religious holidays.
Just don't ask us to use your calendar (or any other that's not a single number that can be used to any precision) inside our OSs or libraries. The "Information Age" needs a calendar system that works using ordinary real numbers, and aside from the question of when the zero was, we have that already.
(Actually, there's also the slowly-growing problem of different clock speeds caused by relativistic effects, but that's probably a discussion for a much more technical forum than this one. ;-)
Oscillococcinum, one of the most common of these quack remedies, typically comes in 200C dilution. A C dilution is a 1/100th dilution, so 200C is 1/(100^200) dilution rate.
Of course, there are also a number of products that use small numbers of X (1/10th) dilutions as well. The 3X-6X dilutions do result in a product that contains the active ingredient.
Funny example: Recently a (real ;-) doctor recommended a particular plant extract to my wife, to treat a minor skin condition that caused major itching and reddening. She found it at Whole Foods, and I noticed that it was labelled as "homeopathic", with a 1X dilution. So it was actually 10% the active ingredient.
It actually worked quite well; the problem disappeared in a few days and hasn't recurred. Checking online showed that it's one of many "natural" ingredients that can be sole OTC, as long as no specific medical claims are made.
So we might ask why they labelled it "homeopathic" when it has such a high fraction of active ingredient. Our guess is "marketing": The company that packages it wants to sell to the not-insignificant fraction of the population that believes in homeopathic cures. The doctors probably just grin, knowing that it's meaningless, but also knowing that a good number of traditional "folk" remedies are actually useful, as long as the problem is minor and precisely-measured medicine isn't required.
Actually, years ago I was diagnosed with chronic "dry skin" by a doctor, who recommended olive oil. He did explain that it really isn't a medicine at all; it just slows down evaporation and lets the skin retain more of the water it gets from deeper tissues. It worked well enough that he said real medication wasn't needed. I've used it off and on ever since, mostly in winter when indoor air is typically very dry, and it works quite well. I wonder if such plant oils are ever labelled "homeopathic", perhaps at a 0X "dilution factor". ;-)
(That doctor also joked about it being a medicine he learned from his Italian grandmother.)
Now before you say it isn't me paying for it, it is the insurance company, it is me- the employer being forced to give you access to that insurance company. The insurance i am forced to provide specifically provides contraception/abortion coverage because of law.
And here we have someone ("sumdumass" ;-) stating the real behind-the-scenes issue at hand: Employers want to be the ones who control what sort of health care their employees get. In particular, employers want the right to deny contraceptives to their female employees. In fact, they do to a great degree currently have that "right". This discussion is about whether a minor part of it can be taken away from the employers and handed over to the affected employees to decide on their own.
This isn't a religious issue at all, because corporations don't have religions (or morals or ethics or ... ;-); they only have products and sales and profits and losses and employees and owners and other such non-religious (but very business-related) things.
The real issue is the desire for company control over their employees lives, up to and including when or whether employees can have children.
The real solution would be to end the perverse American connection of health care to employment. That's the main reason for the expensive disaster that is American health care. It's tied to a part of the culture that is only concerned with profit, and whose usual approach to an employee with a serious health problem is to fire them. As long as this scheme is continued, things will continue to be as screwed up as to lead to discussions like we're having today.
Ah, but are there gay Klingons? That's the real question.
So does this mean I'll have to finally get a twitter account, in sympathy and solidity with Turkish "outlaws"?
MS, Google, Yahoo, all free service, I don't think there is an expectation for privacy.
Or, more generally, anyone who stores anything on a commercial server and expects privacy is a fool.
Yes, this is especially true with "free" services, which must be profitable or they won't exist for long. But one should generally assume that any data that's ever been on any company's machines will be saved (at least backed up) and available indefinitely to any company employee or customer who's willing to pay. Anything else just shows a total misunderstanding of how these companies work.
Actually, some of the jobs I've had has involved maintaining and troubleshooting the email systems. I've had many occasions where as part of fixing a reported problem, I subtly let the people involved know that, yes, I can see the content of all their messages, so they might want to be a bit more careful about what they put in writing. In a few cases, they've even thanked me for this extra warning.
I've found that a good way of explaining this is by telling people that email isn't like a postal letter; it's really more like a post card. Everything is visible to the people who handle the delivery process. Usually they won't read anything, but they can, and with email it's so easy that I often have to carefully avoid reading the content. And in a few cases, I've had to dig into the content itself to figure out why the delivery system messed it up. (I don't like to do this, but some email software does "interesting" things to the content, and the damage can only be fixed by looking at the text itself.)
And, as others have said, with a free service you should understand that you're not the customer, you're the product. Or rather, the content of what you're sending and receiving is their product, which they sell to their actual customers.
Some time back, there was an informative pair of pictures in an xkcd forum. Scan down for "but this" for the images.
There might be a way to include such a search string in a URL, but I don't know how to encode it ...
Yea, researchers for the win. According to grammar researchers (with in 2014), no verbs in this sentence either!
Yeah, but you violated another well-known of grammer's rules: Don't use commas, which aren't needed.
I think the OC is also new to trademarks. If one wants to maintain a trademark, one cannot allow anyone else to "dilute" it.
Um, if that's true, then why didn't the judge cancel Fluke's trademark on this color scheme? As others have pointed out, most (but not quite all) of the multimeters on the US market use the same or a very similar color scheme. I did a quick check of my basement and garage work areas, found three multimeters with dark bodies and yellow edges, none of them a Fluke. (A 4th in a kitchen drawer has a red edge.) The fact that this color scheme is so widely used should have automatically wiped out Fluke's trademark claim.
Anyone know why they succeeded in this one challenge? Why this victim, and not all the other "infringers"?
You know who reviews open source code seriously? Fucking nobody.
Oh, I dunno 'bout dat. I recall a few years ago, getting an informative email from one of djb's folks, telling me how to exploit an open-source program that I was using in the software behind a web site that I was responsible for. I ran their test, dug into the code and fixed the problem (and several similar problems in other parts of the code), and sent them a nice letter thanking them for their help. I also forwarded their email and my patches to the author of the program, but I didn't hear back from him.
This only fails to qualify as "seriously" if you dismiss all of academia as not serious. In reality, that's where you'll find most of the people who take security seriously. You don't much find them in "industry" (as the summary puts it), for management reasons that are well-understood by pretty much anyone who has ever tried to get security problems fixed in a corporate-management environment.
How do we know this isn't an NSA front organization?
Maybe it's time for yet another reminder that the entire Internet can be viewed as a "front" for the US military, via (D)ARPA, the 100% military-funded organization that paid for almost all of the Internet's early development. (Yes, a bit of money did come from independent sources, mostly in academia, but this was < 1% of the funding until around 1985 or so.)
What makes this irrelevant is that the Internet's standards and almost all of its low-level code have long been open-source, and easily available online. This fact was the main reason it won out over OSI. In the 1980s, I worked on a number of projects that were primarily aimed at OSI, but there were delays caused by all the paperwork required for purchase orders for the official standards, and even longer waits for copies of the libraries and compliance-testing code, so while waiting, we built some prototypes on top of IP. By the time all the purchasing bureaucracy gave us what we needed, the IP version was working, so our clients took that, and the rest is history. ;-)
So even if the NSA is funding this work, if the code is all open (and we can compile it ourselves), that doesn't much matter. The problem then is the proprietary code that will be piled on top of it. History tells us that this will continue to be secret, and the major source of security problems. Code designed to collect "marketing" data about customers is inherently easy for people interested in other kinds of spying to take over and redirect for their own purposes.