There seem to be more stories about tech companies suing each other than anything else on/. anymore.
That's because, in the US, that's about the only new technical development that's happening. Anything actually productive has fled to parts of the world where such things are still legal.;-)
Um...clever hack, but should you really be bragging about bypassing a DoD security procedure on a public site with a registered login? If you were a civilian contractor, I would guess that sort of thing would probably be a Federal offense. Don't they come down ever harder on people caught doing that in the service? IANAL (civil or military), but I think that you should probably stop talking about this, like forever.
Unfortunately, you're probably right about all that. And that by itself tells us all we need to know about the actual security of such systems. There's an old tradition behind the "shoot the messenger" approach, and anyone with a bit of intelligence knows what it implies for security.
But it's not just a DoD problem. I've heard it describe by a number of "security consultants" as management not wanting to be told whether their systems are secure, but rather wanting to be told that their systems are secure. This attitude is rampant in most human-run organizations of all sorts, not just government agencies.
In any case, the security folks have often told us that binary-only software should always be treated as insecure. If you want any sort of security, you only install software for which you have the source, and which you've compiled yourself. And yes, this includes the compilers. (And yes, I've read Ken Thompson's classic article on the topic. If you haven't, you don't understand software security.;-)
Oh right linux makes you immune from things like buffer overflows or user assisted attacks.
Nice strawman there.;-) Of course it doesn't. But its open-source nature greatly increases the chances that 1) backdoors will be discovered by interested geeks and removed, and 2) people other than employees of the vendor will be able to fix problems quickly.
I ran across a case of this a while back, when I got a message from one of djb's team telling me how to exploit a security hole in a program used by one of my web sites. I tried it, the exploit succeeded. I opened up the code, found the problem (and a couple more related to it), fixed them, verified that the exploit no longer worked, and sent a letter thanking the guy for the info.
With closed-source software, I couldn't have done any of this. I'd have had to report it to the code's owners, and try to talk them into fixing it. If they decided to fix it (which isn't guaranteed), it would typically take months, during which time my site would have been vulnerable.
I also sent a description of the exploit, along with my patches, back to the code's author, who sent me a letter of thanks, and a day later I saw the message he'd sent to all his known users announcing the "security upgrade" that fixed the problem. The total time for this was under 3 days, which is orders of magnitude faster than most security fixes from commercial closed-source vendors.
Yeah, unix/linux and other open-source systems are vulnerable. But they're so much better at fixing problems that you'd have to be rather gullible to depend on software that doesn't supply this sort of response capability.
(And yes, I understand that most of the buying public is rather gullible. The commercial world depends on that, y'know. I also understand the argument that most people wouldn't know what to do with source code, but I consider this argument bogus. It means that you deny access to people like me, who are able to understand the code and fix it. I've done this many times during my career. You should be encouraging people like me, by making sure we can get at the code to your software.;-)
The authors of TFA probably live in North America. This would explain the comment that the warming was "twice as much as previously thought". This is a hint about what really went wrong: It's yet another case of confusing SI units with English units. This time, it's degrees C versus F. The warming is reported as 4.4 F, which is close to 2.5 C, which is (numerically) about half the expected increase. North Americans in general, and Americans in particular, are sufficiently ignorant of the topic that they'd understand 4.4 F as about twice the value of 2.5 C.
Hey, NASA once lost a Mars probe due to not correctly labelling SI and English units. This is a lot less of a news story than that error.
(My favorite example of confusion between the C/F scales was once hearing a reporter explain a 6 degrees C increase as a 35 degrees F increase. No, I'm not joking.;-)
So which story are you standing behind: Is IQ a single real thing which can be directly measured, or is it a statistical analysis of a variety of different factors like the researchers in this story are claiming?
Is weight a single real thing which can be directly measured, or is it a sum of a variety of different body parts?
A traditional term for this sort of question is "false dichotomy".
We all understand why your weight isn't a very useful measure of size when buying shoes or gloves or hats, or just about any other article of clothing. Why is it so difficult to understand that the same might be true of intelligence?
Well, for several centuries, in the understanding of the general public. The verification that they're very different sorts of critters dates back only a few decades. The proposed splitting of bacteria and archaea orginated in the 1970s, and it became fully accepted by biologists during the 1990s.
Thus, the media and the general population have had only 20 to 30 years to adapt to this new classification, and that's not nearly enough time. They also keep talking about the extinction of the dinosaurs, several decades after zoologists officially reclassified the birds as a branch of the dinosaurs based on rather extensive evidence.
About all we can do about this is educate people. Mocking them for confusing archaea and bacteria won't have much effect; they'll just dismiss you as a jerk and ignore you. So try to explain the mistake, rather than ridiculing it, and you may have more success.
(Our little pet dinosaur, a blue-crowned conure, just flew onto my shoulder. She says "Squawk!" Actually, it sounds like she's saying "Iraq!", trying to get into a political discussion. She doesn't understand that we're talking about archaea, either. But she and her relatives may understand the issue before a lot of the human population does.;-)
Or you could eat right, exercise, and moderate health-negative behaviors like drinking and tanning,...
My one criticism of this is the extensive evidence that ethanol in "moderate" quantities is very strongly correlated with living longer. The only problem is maintaining the "moderate" level of input.
The first evidence I read of this was back in the 1970s, when the UK's medical folks did what's now called a "data dredging" study of their medical records to learn what things were correlated with lifespan. One of the strongest signals that they reported was with alcohol. Their summary was that, while drunkards didn't fare too well, the teetotalers didn't do much better. The longest lifespan was correlated with 2-4 "drinks" (around an ounce of ethanol each) per day, depending on their weight of course. They also reported that the strongest effect was from the beer and wine drinkers, while people who consumed mostly distilled beverages had only about half the lifespan benefit. OTOH, people who drank alcohol mixed with fruit juices benefitted as much as the beer and wine drinkers. They suggested that this meant that ethanol itself provided only half the benefit, and the rest probably came from the vitamins provided by the yeast or fruit juices. They also said that there was weak evidence that the best approach is a glass or two of fermented beverages with every meal. Their main conclusion was the canonical "Further research is needed".
My wife has worked with medical statistics for a few decades now, and she has enjoyed finding and passing on the results of this further research. Several times per year, a new study has come out reporting the mechanisms behind the benefits of such low levels of ethanol in the human diet. Every such report seems to make the story more complex than it was before.
This has become one of the canonical examples of a "J-shaped" response curve. In small quantities, ethanol has measurable health benefits, but above a certain level, it becomes a toxin. This is similar to the response curve for most vitamins, though 2-4 ounces per day is orders of magnitude too high to fit the definition of "vitamin".
Meanwhile, a number of biologists I know chimed in with the observation that we humans are descended from tree-living primates, whose diet included a large quantity of fruits. Most fruits, especially those with a significant sugar content, come with a load of yeasts, and are typically around 1/2 to 1% ethanol. We primates are adapted to this diet. We have metabolic tools for dealing with the ethanol, which we metabolize as a simple sugar. Like other fruit-eating animals (elephants, flying foxes, etc.;-), we tend to like things with low levels of ethanol. A diet with a glass of beer or wine per meal produces stomach content around 1% ethanol. So it's no surprise that it should be a beneficial diet for us.
The main problem with all of this is that a fraction (5%-10% according to various sources) of the human population become physically addicted to ethanol and become alcoholics. Such individuals are better off not consuming it at all. They may not live as long as the "moderate" drinkers, but they'll be better off than if they follow their natural urges and drink too much.
As usual, YMMV.;-) And further research is still needed...
Hey, which stock exchange deals in "torch and pitchfork" stocks? Interested potential customers want to know...;-)
Meanwhile, on a more serious train, I didn't take note of the names (or employers) of the people in such interviews. I just found that they were making, uh, "interesting" comments that seemed to agree with predictions from assorted economist types. What was most interesting was that they'd so openly make such comments to known interviewers, despite the obvious danger from people with torches and pitchforks if their names became common knowledge. Apparently they thought that the American public had internalized the "market forces" ideology so thoroughly that they were safe in admitting their approach within range of a recording device.
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Yeah, and that link reminds me that interested net.historians might google "Canter and Siegel" to read yet another story from the early days of the Internet, about how a pair of enterprising lawyers figured out that the Net could be used for nearly-free advertising, with a little desktop computer doing all the dirty work. Why pay all those price-gouging newspapers and journals, when you can get the word out for less than a penny per ad?
Vaccines aren't profitable if everyone is making them and the only way to compete is price
True, but that's equally true for all other drugs. The way it's usually handled is that the "innovator" company gets a patent. Then they have a monopoly for many years, because nobody can legally compete with them. Or they can license the drug and collect royalties while others do all the production and marketing work.
That's just what they do with most new drugs. But with vaccines, they don't seem to bother, because even with a legal monopoly, it's still difficult to recover the development costs.
Of course, this is made worse by the religious nuts who've been campaigning against vaccines lately. The idea seems to be that if God created the organism that causes a disease, you shouldn't violate God's will by interfering with that organism's life cycle.;-) But, of course, this has nothing to do with economics.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
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I think that was his point, back in the day (lol) people weren't spamming so much so it was ok to allow anyone to post links without worrying about moderation. You would get a few spam links and tons (relatively) of valid link
Oh, I dunno about that. I remember back in the 80s, well before the Web, when there were any number of usenet groups that found they had to go moderated, to control the flood of messages from robot posters. These were typically the newsgroups whose topics were found offensive by some crowd.
The poster child for this was the difficulty of having an open, unmoderated discussion of any biological topics. The problem is the famous quip by Theodosius Dobzhansky, that "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". Many, if not most discussions would inevitably entail some aspect of the evolutionary process, and as soon as someone mentioned this, the thread would be buried in hundreds or thousands of replies from the religious fundies, often via automatic posting from bots that looked for "evolutionary" keywords. This would instantly bury the discussion and end it. The only solution was to "go moderated", and even that sometimes didn't help. Some of the deeper discussions were done on private newsgroups with carefully-controlled access.
Similarly, I knew a few people who were involved in serious discussions of Middle-Eastern history, and found a similar problem: Any mention of Armenia would trigger a flood of bot-generated messages, some megabytes in size, from the Turkish crowd trying to interfere with anything that might mention the Armenian genocide. (Hmmm... I wonder if they're watching this discussion.;-).
Granted, this generally wasn't commercial spam. But such fanaticism can be even worse, since their tactic was often to auto-reply with everything they could find related to the topic, which would usually fill up your disk if you couldn't find a way to block it. It was much worse than the "binary" (i.e., porn;-) groups, since those were generally set up to only send their huge image files when you explicitly requested them. The political/religious fanatics are trying to "educate" you by making sure you have all their literature on their topic.
For some reason, most technical computer-related newsgroups never had such problems. They did get commercial spam now and then, but deleting it wasn't a real problem until the late 90s.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
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Well, my provider (T-Mobile) doesn't block access to weather.gov. I also checked my wife's iPhone, whose deficient mobile Safari browser (;-) and AT&T also accept weather.gov without complaint.
So I wonder if we can find a list of which mobile providers (or apps) actually do such blocking? Not that I doubt that such blocking happens; I'm just curious that my sample of two didn't find such blocking. There aren't very many more mobile providers hereabouts (the northeastern US), so those two do account for a significant fraction of the sample space. And Android+IOS pretty much covers most (i.e., >50%) of the "smartphone" population hereabouts.
The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy.
And assorted people, including those working in the health industry, have explained that this is a simple result of a "market" health system. Thus, I've heard or read a number of exchanges in which an interviewer asks a Pharm rep why their company has gotten out of the vaccine business. The reply is generally of the form "Because vaccines aren't profitable". The interviewer asks for further details. The rep explains that a vaccine cures the patient, or prevents them from even getting sick. This means that you sell them nothing, or maybe a few doses of a medicine, and then you make no more money from them. The profitable drugs/treatments are those that maintains the patient as a patient, requiring ongoing treatment for the rest of their lives.
I first ran across this, years ago, as a criticism of the commercial health system. But now I'm hearing it from the supporters and reps of that health system, as an explanation for why they're so profitable.
So if you want to be kept healthy, maybe you should be pushing for a system that wants you to be healthy, rather than one that wants you as a (paying) patient. The current system (at least here in the US) punishes the companies that market things that keep you healthy, and rewards those who convert you to a patient with a chronic condition.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
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What mobile provider are you using that blocks weather sites?
Um, reread the OP's message, which says
Last time I checked usenet was blocked by my provider.
(Emphasis mine.;-)
I use weather.gov, too, on my Android phone, and it works. It does have some of the usual problems with wanting my screen to be bigger than it is, but that's also a common frustration with the "walled-garden" software that I've tested things on. (One of the really dumb omissions in the HTTP and/or HTML protocols is that they don't provide a standard way for a client app to inform a server about the size of its window/screen. This is an ongoing frustration among web developers.)
But usenet is getting very difficult to find. This is a major loss of functionality, since the usenet readers are good at ironing out the differences between different end systems. It has mostly been replaced by a flock of online "forum" sites (such as slashdot), each of which imposes its own UI on readers, making life difficult for those of us who are involved in a lot of technical discussions.
One of the worst examples of this turns out to be HTML5. I've gone googling for answers to "How do you... in HTML5?" questions, and often find that there are hundreds of online forums that have questions on the "..." topic. No two of them have the same UI, and most require logins to ask a question. And with so many of them, most have only a handful of readers, so you have to ask on a lot of different HTML5 forums before you find someone who can actually answer a question. An html5 usenet group would be extremely useful in cutting through this mess -- if it could attract a few thousand regular readers to get the ball rolling.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
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... if the noobs leave the web it's better for both of us, I don't see a problem here.
Nah; on balance they almost certainly add to the Web's value. For example, I've been running a "search" site for a few hundred sites that put a certain variety of rather technical information online. The data is in a format that google and other natural-language search sites don't understand. It's reasonable that google wouldn't want to bother dealing with a highly-technical data format that has only a few thousand users world-wide, and there are now hundreds (maybe thousands) of specialized search sites for dealing with many such technical data.
Most of my "users" of such technical data are definitely "noobs" at web stuff, who rely on the help of a few people like me for getting their stuff online and accessible to the rest of their crowd. But having their data online and searchable is valuable to people working in such technical fields. And the rest of us all benefit when the technical specialists can find their field's data quickly.
Granted, lolcats and the like are a big waste of time. But I wouldn't dismiss the contributions of all the noobs that are now online, with the help of geeks and nerds like me who helped get them online. Their easy access to their fields' data may be making your life better.
You just have to learn how to avoid the time-wasting stuff.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
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And folks who got on the Web after Adblock have no idea what you're talking about.
So you're saying that there are ads on the Web? Really? Next you're gonna tell me that there are ads on slashdot.;-)
... Huh? What? Where? I don't see any...
(Actually, I sometimes use Safari on my Macbook, and it sometimes shows me ads. So does Safari add those ads, or do they actually originate at the web sites? Curious users want to know...;-)
That "negative, yet insignificant" bit was actually in the abstract. When I read it, my immediate thought was "Typo?" But yeah, it was a case of someone dropping the "in some cases" phrase. This wasn't an error in the reporting; it was done by whoever wrote the published abstract.
You'd think they'd have noticed and fixed it by now. Or perhaps (being social scientists;-) they didn't understand the issue, and were really just using common speech rather than technical speech in the abstract. As someone already pointed out, "(in)significant" means something different in common speech and statistical terminology.
Slashdot Mirror
How many public 'bathrooms' in the US sense actually contain a bath?
Almost none, because they are usually called "rest rooms". ;-)
But there are jokes about that euphemism, too, because they never contain the beds or couches or cots you'd expect in a "rest" room.
The cause of theft: people carry items worth stealing! The cause of rape: ? Please follow the same logic and see how idiotic it is.
Lessee; if we use the logic we've read here, we'd conclude that the way for a woman to avoid rape is to be cheap.
That's what you meant, right? ;-)
There seem to be more stories about tech companies suing each other than anything else on /. anymore.
That's because, in the US, that's about the only new technical development that's happening. Anything actually productive has fled to parts of the world where such things are still legal. ;-)
Um...clever hack, but should you really be bragging about bypassing a DoD security procedure on a public site with a registered login? If you were a civilian contractor, I would guess that sort of thing would probably be a Federal offense. Don't they come down ever harder on people caught doing that in the service? IANAL (civil or military), but I think that you should probably stop talking about this, like forever.
Unfortunately, you're probably right about all that. And that by itself tells us all we need to know about the actual security of such systems. There's an old tradition behind the "shoot the messenger" approach, and anyone with a bit of intelligence knows what it implies for security.
But it's not just a DoD problem. I've heard it describe by a number of "security consultants" as management not wanting to be told whether their systems are secure, but rather wanting to be told that their systems are secure. This attitude is rampant in most human-run organizations of all sorts, not just government agencies.
In any case, the security folks have often told us that binary-only software should always be treated as insecure. If you want any sort of security, you only install software for which you have the source, and which you've compiled yourself. And yes, this includes the compilers. (And yes, I've read Ken Thompson's classic article on the topic. If you haven't, you don't understand software security. ;-)
Oh right linux makes you immune from things like buffer overflows or user assisted attacks.
Nice strawman there. ;-) Of course it doesn't. But its open-source nature greatly increases the chances that 1) backdoors will be discovered by interested geeks and removed, and 2) people other than employees of the vendor will be able to fix problems quickly.
I ran across a case of this a while back, when I got a message from one of djb's team telling me how to exploit a security hole in a program used by one of my web sites. I tried it, the exploit succeeded. I opened up the code, found the problem (and a couple more related to it), fixed them, verified that the exploit no longer worked, and sent a letter thanking the guy for the info.
With closed-source software, I couldn't have done any of this. I'd have had to report it to the code's owners, and try to talk them into fixing it. If they decided to fix it (which isn't guaranteed), it would typically take months, during which time my site would have been vulnerable.
I also sent a description of the exploit, along with my patches, back to the code's author, who sent me a letter of thanks, and a day later I saw the message he'd sent to all his known users announcing the "security upgrade" that fixed the problem. The total time for this was under 3 days, which is orders of magnitude faster than most security fixes from commercial closed-source vendors.
Yeah, unix/linux and other open-source systems are vulnerable. But they're so much better at fixing problems that you'd have to be rather gullible to depend on software that doesn't supply this sort of response capability.
(And yes, I understand that most of the buying public is rather gullible. The commercial world depends on that, y'know. I also understand the argument that most people wouldn't know what to do with source code, but I consider this argument bogus. It means that you deny access to people like me, who are able to understand the code and fix it. I've done this many times during my career. You should be encouraging people like me, by making sure we can get at the code to your software. ;-)
It's well-known that removing Windows makes your computer more secure.
And if you don't replace it with any other OS, you've pretty much maximized your security.
You must live in North Antarctica.
The authors of TFA probably live in North America. This would explain the comment that the warming was "twice as much as previously thought". This is a hint about what really went wrong: It's yet another case of confusing SI units with English units. This time, it's degrees C versus F. The warming is reported as 4.4 F, which is close to 2.5 C, which is (numerically) about half the expected increase. North Americans in general, and Americans in particular, are sufficiently ignorant of the topic that they'd understand 4.4 F as about twice the value of 2.5 C.
Hey, NASA once lost a Mars probe due to not correctly labelling SI and English units. This is a lot less of a news story than that error.
(My favorite example of confusion between the C/F scales was once hearing a reporter explain a 6 degrees C increase as a 35 degrees F increase. No, I'm not joking. ;-)
So.... does this IQ make me look fat?
Yeah, fat-headed. ;-)
(But you were expecting that, right?)
So which story are you standing behind: Is IQ a single real thing which can be directly measured, or is it a statistical analysis of a variety of different factors like the researchers in this story are claiming?
Is weight a single real thing which can be directly measured, or is it a sum of a variety of different body parts?
A traditional term for this sort of question is "false dichotomy".
We all understand why your weight isn't a very useful measure of size when buying shoes or gloves or hats, or just about any other article of clothing. Why is it so difficult to understand that the same might be true of intelligence?
Since when have archaea been bacteria?
Well, for several centuries, in the understanding of the general public. The verification that they're very different sorts of critters dates back only a few decades. The proposed splitting of bacteria and archaea orginated in the 1970s, and it became fully accepted by biologists during the 1990s.
Thus, the media and the general population have had only 20 to 30 years to adapt to this new classification, and that's not nearly enough time. They also keep talking about the extinction of the dinosaurs, several decades after zoologists officially reclassified the birds as a branch of the dinosaurs based on rather extensive evidence.
About all we can do about this is educate people. Mocking them for confusing archaea and bacteria won't have much effect; they'll just dismiss you as a jerk and ignore you. So try to explain the mistake, rather than ridiculing it, and you may have more success.
(Our little pet dinosaur, a blue-crowned conure, just flew onto my shoulder. She says "Squawk!" Actually, it sounds like she's saying "Iraq!", trying to get into a political discussion. She doesn't understand that we're talking about archaea, either. But she and her relatives may understand the issue before a lot of the human population does. ;-)
Of course it could happen. You said it yourself it has happened before. What kind of silly question is that?
It's called a rhetorical question. It's a popular linguistic technique in some circles. ;-)
Or you could eat right, exercise, and moderate health-negative behaviors like drinking and tanning, ...
My one criticism of this is the extensive evidence that ethanol in "moderate" quantities is very strongly correlated with living longer. The only problem is maintaining the "moderate" level of input.
The first evidence I read of this was back in the 1970s, when the UK's medical folks did what's now called a "data dredging" study of their medical records to learn what things were correlated with lifespan. One of the strongest signals that they reported was with alcohol. Their summary was that, while drunkards didn't fare too well, the teetotalers didn't do much better. The longest lifespan was correlated with 2-4 "drinks" (around an ounce of ethanol each) per day, depending on their weight of course. They also reported that the strongest effect was from the beer and wine drinkers, while people who consumed mostly distilled beverages had only about half the lifespan benefit. OTOH, people who drank alcohol mixed with fruit juices benefitted as much as the beer and wine drinkers. They suggested that this meant that ethanol itself provided only half the benefit, and the rest probably came from the vitamins provided by the yeast or fruit juices. They also said that there was weak evidence that the best approach is a glass or two of fermented beverages with every meal. Their main conclusion was the canonical "Further research is needed".
My wife has worked with medical statistics for a few decades now, and she has enjoyed finding and passing on the results of this further research. Several times per year, a new study has come out reporting the mechanisms behind the benefits of such low levels of ethanol in the human diet. Every such report seems to make the story more complex than it was before.
This has become one of the canonical examples of a "J-shaped" response curve. In small quantities, ethanol has measurable health benefits, but above a certain level, it becomes a toxin. This is similar to the response curve for most vitamins, though 2-4 ounces per day is orders of magnitude too high to fit the definition of "vitamin".
Meanwhile, a number of biologists I know chimed in with the observation that we humans are descended from tree-living primates, whose diet included a large quantity of fruits. Most fruits, especially those with a significant sugar content, come with a load of yeasts, and are typically around 1/2 to 1% ethanol. We primates are adapted to this diet. We have metabolic tools for dealing with the ethanol, which we metabolize as a simple sugar. Like other fruit-eating animals (elephants, flying foxes, etc. ;-), we tend to like things with low levels of ethanol. A diet with a glass of beer or wine per meal produces stomach content around 1% ethanol. So it's no surprise that it should be a beneficial diet for us.
The main problem with all of this is that a fraction (5%-10% according to various sources) of the human population become physically addicted to ethanol and become alcoholics. Such individuals are better off not consuming it at all. They may not live as long as the "moderate" drinkers, but they'll be better off than if they follow their natural urges and drink too much.
As usual, YMMV. ;-) And further research is still needed ...
Hey, which stock exchange deals in "torch and pitchfork" stocks? Interested potential customers want to know ... ;-)
Meanwhile, on a more serious train, I didn't take note of the names (or employers) of the people in such interviews. I just found that they were making, uh, "interesting" comments that seemed to agree with predictions from assorted economist types. What was most interesting was that they'd so openly make such comments to known interviewers, despite the obvious danger from people with torches and pitchforks if their names became common knowledge. Apparently they thought that the American public had internalized the "market forces" ideology so thoroughly that they were safe in admitting their approach within range of a recording device.
Yeah, and that link reminds me that interested net.historians might google "Canter and Siegel" to read yet another story from the early days of the Internet, about how a pair of enterprising lawyers figured out that the Net could be used for nearly-free advertising, with a little desktop computer doing all the dirty work. Why pay all those price-gouging newspapers and journals, when you can get the word out for less than a penny per ad?
Vaccines aren't profitable if everyone is making them and the only way to compete is price
True, but that's equally true for all other drugs. The way it's usually handled is that the "innovator" company gets a patent. Then they have a monopoly for many years, because nobody can legally compete with them. Or they can license the drug and collect royalties while others do all the production and marketing work.
That's just what they do with most new drugs. But with vaccines, they don't seem to bother, because even with a legal monopoly, it's still difficult to recover the development costs.
Of course, this is made worse by the religious nuts who've been campaigning against vaccines lately. The idea seems to be that if God created the organism that causes a disease, you shouldn't violate God's will by interfering with that organism's life cycle. ;-) But, of course, this has nothing to do with economics.
I think that was his point, back in the day (lol) people weren't spamming so much so it was ok to allow anyone to post links without worrying about moderation. You would get a few spam links and tons (relatively) of valid link
Oh, I dunno about that. I remember back in the 80s, well before the Web, when there were any number of usenet groups that found they had to go moderated, to control the flood of messages from robot posters. These were typically the newsgroups whose topics were found offensive by some crowd.
The poster child for this was the difficulty of having an open, unmoderated discussion of any biological topics. The problem is the famous quip by Theodosius Dobzhansky, that "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". Many, if not most discussions would inevitably entail some aspect of the evolutionary process, and as soon as someone mentioned this, the thread would be buried in hundreds or thousands of replies from the religious fundies, often via automatic posting from bots that looked for "evolutionary" keywords. This would instantly bury the discussion and end it. The only solution was to "go moderated", and even that sometimes didn't help. Some of the deeper discussions were done on private newsgroups with carefully-controlled access.
Similarly, I knew a few people who were involved in serious discussions of Middle-Eastern history, and found a similar problem: Any mention of Armenia would trigger a flood of bot-generated messages, some megabytes in size, from the Turkish crowd trying to interfere with anything that might mention the Armenian genocide. (Hmmm ... I wonder if they're watching this discussion. ;-).
Granted, this generally wasn't commercial spam. But such fanaticism can be even worse, since their tactic was often to auto-reply with everything they could find related to the topic, which would usually fill up your disk if you couldn't find a way to block it. It was much worse than the "binary" (i.e., porn ;-) groups, since those were generally set up to only send their huge image files when you explicitly requested them. The political/religious fanatics are trying to "educate" you by making sure you have all their literature on their topic.
For some reason, most technical computer-related newsgroups never had such problems. They did get commercial spam now and then, but deleting it wasn't a real problem until the late 90s.
Well, my provider (T-Mobile) doesn't block access to weather.gov. I also checked my wife's iPhone, whose deficient mobile Safari browser (;-) and AT&T also accept weather.gov without complaint.
So I wonder if we can find a list of which mobile providers (or apps) actually do such blocking? Not that I doubt that such blocking happens; I'm just curious that my sample of two didn't find such blocking. There aren't very many more mobile providers hereabouts (the northeastern US), so those two do account for a significant fraction of the sample space. And Android+IOS pretty much covers most (i.e., >50%) of the "smartphone" population hereabouts.
The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy.
And assorted people, including those working in the health industry, have explained that this is a simple result of a "market" health system. Thus, I've heard or read a number of exchanges in which an interviewer asks a Pharm rep why their company has gotten out of the vaccine business. The reply is generally of the form "Because vaccines aren't profitable". The interviewer asks for further details. The rep explains that a vaccine cures the patient, or prevents them from even getting sick. This means that you sell them nothing, or maybe a few doses of a medicine, and then you make no more money from them. The profitable drugs/treatments are those that maintains the patient as a patient, requiring ongoing treatment for the rest of their lives.
I first ran across this, years ago, as a criticism of the commercial health system. But now I'm hearing it from the supporters and reps of that health system, as an explanation for why they're so profitable.
So if you want to be kept healthy, maybe you should be pushing for a system that wants you to be healthy, rather than one that wants you as a (paying) patient. The current system (at least here in the US) punishes the companies that market things that keep you healthy, and rewards those who convert you to a patient with a chronic condition.
What mobile provider are you using that blocks weather sites?
Um, reread the OP's message, which says
Last time I checked usenet was blocked by my provider.
(Emphasis mine. ;-)
I use weather.gov, too, on my Android phone, and it works. It does have some of the usual problems with wanting my screen to be bigger than it is, but that's also a common frustration with the "walled-garden" software that I've tested things on. (One of the really dumb omissions in the HTTP and/or HTML protocols is that they don't provide a standard way for a client app to inform a server about the size of its window/screen. This is an ongoing frustration among web developers.)
But usenet is getting very difficult to find. This is a major loss of functionality, since the usenet readers are good at ironing out the differences between different end systems. It has mostly been replaced by a flock of online "forum" sites (such as slashdot), each of which imposes its own UI on readers, making life difficult for those of us who are involved in a lot of technical discussions.
One of the worst examples of this turns out to be HTML5. I've gone googling for answers to "How do you ... in HTML5?" questions, and often find that there are hundreds of online forums that have questions on the "..." topic. No two of them have the same UI, and most require logins to ask a question. And with so many of them, most have only a handful of readers, so you have to ask on a lot of different HTML5 forums before you find someone who can actually answer a question. An html5 usenet group would be extremely useful in cutting through this mess -- if it could attract a few thousand regular readers to get the ball rolling.
... if the noobs leave the web it's better for both of us, I don't see a problem here.
Nah; on balance they almost certainly add to the Web's value. For example, I've been running a "search" site for a few hundred sites that put a certain variety of rather technical information online. The data is in a format that google and other natural-language search sites don't understand. It's reasonable that google wouldn't want to bother dealing with a highly-technical data format that has only a few thousand users world-wide, and there are now hundreds (maybe thousands) of specialized search sites for dealing with many such technical data.
Most of my "users" of such technical data are definitely "noobs" at web stuff, who rely on the help of a few people like me for getting their stuff online and accessible to the rest of their crowd. But having their data online and searchable is valuable to people working in such technical fields. And the rest of us all benefit when the technical specialists can find their field's data quickly.
Granted, lolcats and the like are a big waste of time. But I wouldn't dismiss the contributions of all the noobs that are now online, with the help of geeks and nerds like me who helped get them online. Their easy access to their fields' data may be making your life better.
You just have to learn how to avoid the time-wasting stuff.
And folks who got on the Web after Adblock have no idea what you're talking about.
So you're saying that there are ads on the Web? Really? Next you're gonna tell me that there are ads on slashdot. ;-)
(Actually, I sometimes use Safari on my Macbook, and it sometimes shows me ads. So does Safari add those ads, or do they actually originate at the web sites? Curious users want to know ... ;-)
... either iDevices have more spyware or the spyware on Android devices is more efficient.
It's entirely possible that both are true. ;-)
I don't think there is any danger of /. deciding not to respect someone who posts a rant against Apple :)
Wait; I thought /. was controlled by Apple fanboys who down-modded anything that criticised Apple (or didn't criticise Micro$oft).
So which is it?
Tag it on to an unrelated but politically hot bill and watch it ride through!
Ah, but then how do you plan to enforce it?
That "negative, yet insignificant" bit was actually in the abstract. When I read it, my immediate thought was "Typo?" But yeah, it was a case of someone dropping the "in some cases" phrase. This wasn't an error in the reporting; it was done by whoever wrote the published abstract.
You'd think they'd have noticed and fixed it by now. Or perhaps (being social scientists ;-) they didn't understand the issue, and were really just using common speech rather than technical speech in the abstract. As someone already pointed out, "(in)significant" means something different in common speech and statistical terminology.