More recently, I have had serious eye/head pain. The eye doctors didn't know what it was. Out of a whim I visited a chiropractor, and a day later I was totally fine.
Correlation does not indicate causation. How do you know your pain wouldn't have gone away anyway? It generally does. The human body is remarkably good at fixing itself.
I'm glad you and your mother have recovered from your medical problems, but you must realise that your experiences simply don't prove anything.
Note that this is not an attack on your experiences. They are meaningless because they are anecdotes, not because they relate to alternative medicine. If I were to tell you that I visited a regular doctor who prescribed a drug and I got better after taking that drug, then that too would prove nothing whatsoever. The only way to prove that a treatment is effective is to conduct scientific tests covering sufficient numbers of people to produce statistically significant results. Anecdotes merely muddy the waters.
Re:I agree. But that's a different problem
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 4, Insightful
IOW: Skepticism as a business has far outstripped anti-science nuttiness from new-age and other so-called 'alternative' medical and science quacks.
Ah, right, that's why skeptics are literally raking in billions of dollars selling their books and skeptic products, and their faces are familiar to all of us from their constant appearances on prime-time TV.
Oh, no, wait a minute, that's the alternative practitioners, while skepticism remains largely unprofitable.
There's no such thing as a 'proven alternative treatment'. Once it's proven to work it's not alternative medicine any more, it's just medicine.
Actually, there is a useful meaning for this phrase. A "proven alternative treatment" is one that has been proven not to cause obvious harm to the patient. In other words, something like homeopathy or magnetic bandages that simply does nothing whatsoever.
Contrast with "experimental alternative treatment", which means eating a random herb and hoping it isn't poisonous.
I[f] you've got one of the many bad ones, they're going to start with the most expensive concoction.
Maybe that's the case in a profit-oriented system like in the USA. Other countries have evil socialist healthcare systems that mean that doctors have no incentive whatsoever to prescribe the most expensive treatment or to prolong your treatment unnecessarily, so they concentrate on doing their job properly instead.
Great idea! And given our global history of perfect peaceful cooperation, I'm sure we'll have no trouble at all persuading every single country in the world to collect one penny from every email sender.
Not since 1999, which was the last time I had more free time than sense. There's no real reason to any more. For the few cases where the distro doesn't provide a perfectly adequate kernel, there are generally third-party packages available that are reasonably well tested and integrated with the regular update system. (Example: Adamm's kernel for Ubuntu on EeePCs.)
Indeed, only last week I listened to a radio programme on the official state broadcaster whose host was openly mocking the Queen's accent. If mobs have marched through London demanding blood, then they have somehow managed to escape the notice of the world's media.
Or you could look back at all the fuss there was about that documentary a while back where the trailer was edited in such a way as to suggest that the Queen walked out of an interview in a huff. There was a little anger, and a lot of mildly critical media coverage. The boss at whose desk the buck stopped resigned. So far he hasn't been murdered.
Are you talking about the same Obama that put Joe the plumber under intense investigation
No more intense than everyone else who stood up in the spotlight. Doesn't the public have a right to know whether the claims people are making are true or not? And it was the press as much as Obama who went and investigated. I don't think we really want to discourage our free press from investigating claims that someone is trying to use to influence a presidential election, do we?
So, not everything they uncovered was nice. That's not their fault. If you want to stand up and complain about taxes, it helps if you've actually paid them. Joe the plumber learned that the hard way.
Is this the Obama that makes you feel warm and fuzzy about the 1st amendment?
Joe the plumber had the right to speak freely, he exercised that right, and nobody did anything to restrain him or to prevent him having plenty of media exposure where he was positively encouraged to go into great detail about his beliefs.
He got a massive audience for his speech, which is way more than the First Amendment guarantees.
So there were bad consequences? Too bad. The First Amendment says nothing, nothing at all, about the consequences of exercising your right. All it says is that Congress can't make any laws taking that right away.
Perhaps you would have better luck if you tried Codeweavers' commercial products instead of relying on the free Wine. Free software is usually driven by the needs and desires of the people who are developing it. Codeweavers, on the other hand, are partly driven by a commercial need to sell stuff and find new customers. They have professional support staff instead of a faceless bug database. They also provide you with an opportunity to put your money where your mouth is, and say how valuable those apps are to you in dollars.
This is all useless if your motivation for using Linux is that you want stuff for free, of course, but those of us who use Linux for technical or (some) political reasons appreciate it.
They have not yet achieved 100% compatibility with Win32, and therefore it is natural and proper that they need to produce a compatibility list, because that's useful for people who want to know whether such-and-such a program works or not.
Your C++ analogy is nonsensical. C++ has a well-documented specification, and compliance can be proven by listing how well your compiler conforms to the specification; C++ programs are generally written based on the specification, and rarely take advantage of undocumented quirks of a single specific compiler. This is not remotely comparable to the situation with Windows.
And Wine is much more than a collection of application-specific hacks. I have successfully used it to run proprietary Windows programs that no Wine developer has even heard of; they don't all work, but many run flawlessly.
"Perl or Python?" is like "awk or sed?". They solve different problems. They're suited to different tasks. For the parts where they overlap, though, there are various arguments either way. There's a reason why there are flamewars about this stuff. You get flamewars when the arguments on both sides are evenly matched, and the choice therefore becomes a religious issue.
Perl has some advantages. It has anonymous functions that aren't crippled. It has predictable lexical scoping. It has (optional) variable declarations. It has more libraries, and a very convenient standard way of installing them. It's available on any Unix system, whereas Python programmers are frequently reduced to begging sysadmins to install their favourite language. (And sysadmins frequently prefer Perl...)
Perl also has disadvantages: cryptic syntax, too much magic DWIM stuff, no standard way of doing OOP, etc. Note that these are all areas where Python is strong; if you care about consistency, Python is going to be a better choice for you personally.
Neither is a clear winner on performance; Perl is faster for some things, Python for others.
"Signals" for "sigils", describing ClearCase as a "rear-vision control system"... was this article dictated over a noisy phone line to someone who knows nothing about computers?
Spreadsheets are a bit of a wash for me. (I use Perl, Octave and other tools to reduce data to CSV form, which is then imported into a spreadsheet for final formatting; application of colour, etc).
If the final spreadsheet format is XLS, then you can use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel to apply all the formatting within your Perl script, and avoid all the problems inherent to CSV like poor Unicode support and the inability to specify things like number formats.
One of the few cases where an Excel format is actually vaguely convenient to use. I don't know if there's an ODF equivalent yet.
to be honest, OS X really is Unix anyway, making it much more simlar in the way it works to Linux thn windows.
Not really. Oh, sure, OS X is a certified UNIX(r) and all that, but the UNIX bit is a subset of the complete OS X, and there isn't much of a visible intersection between the UNIX bit and the bit that most Mac users actually use from day to day, which is built on a whole bunch of proprietary Mac-specific stuff like Quartz that has nothing whatsoever to do with UNIX.
I suppose you may be able to boot from a USB drive.
That's a definite "yes", not a "maybe". You just use something like unetbootin to copy the live CD to a USB stick, then boot from that. It's all GUI-driven, so it's pretty straightforward.
Even for non net books, Linux is just better than windows for mobiles. It uses significantly less resources and my usable battery life has increased by at least 30% from switching from Vista to Ubuntu.
Better than Vista doesn't necessarily mean better than Windows; among EeePC users, the general experience is that Windows XP can get at least an hour more battery life than Ubuntu, though last time I checked Intel were working pretty hard to close the gap.
Linux can still be preferable for other reasons, though. It's got a better security record and is a much less attractive hacker target, which is rather nice on a device that you're constantly going to be using at untrusted wifi hotspots. It's more flexible in many ways, too -- for example, the Windows interface really doesn't work at all well on a netbook-sized screen, but X11 can be configured in many different ways to give you something comfortable.
Oh, and it's Linux, which for any true nerd is an advantage in itself.;)
You won't be able to tell just from the packaging that there's advertisements in the game.
Well, you should be able to. There should be a "Warning: Contains Marketing" statement, alongside the warnings about violent content or bad language.
Personally I'm far more concerned about our children being exposed to marketing in video games than I am about violence or anything else that the media have moral panics about. Childhood exposure to Coca-Cola marketing and McDonalds marketing is the direct cause of many serious health problems. Childhood exposure to nipples has not been proven to have any negative effect at all (in fact, breastfeeding proponents seem to argue it's a good thing). So the ESRB and their counterparts in other countries should be putting a very prominent warning on the packaging when a game contains these nasty messages that are teaching our children to poison themselves.
But if you pay maybe half the price for the ad supported version, everything is the same except there is billboards with ads for coca-cola?
I will accept a game that has billboards with ads for Coca-Cola -- if and only if that same game, in the same play session, also contains billboards with ads for Pepsi.
That would be realistic, and would therefore add to immersion and enhance the game.
What, the Coca-Cola marketing board don't like the idea? Too bad. I guess I won't play that game then.
"Fact"? What "fact" is this? The publishers may have claimed that the ads will not be intrusive, but just saying something doesn't make it true. Marketers are lying scum, and like all liars, the things they say tend not to be true.
The fact is that advertisements and product placement are nearly always intrusive.
To be sure, no government in history -- democracy or otherwise -- has ever significantly, permanently, and willingly reduced its level of power or revenue.
So... when King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, once the absolute ruler of Bhutan, unilaterally and voluntarily decided to set up a democratic system of government, and then abdicated... that somehow didn't count as a government significantly, permanently, and willingly reducing its level of power?
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Correlation does not indicate causation. How do you know your pain wouldn't have gone away anyway? It generally does. The human body is remarkably good at fixing itself.
I'm glad you and your mother have recovered from your medical problems, but you must realise that your experiences simply don't prove anything.
Note that this is not an attack on your experiences. They are meaningless because they are anecdotes, not because they relate to alternative medicine. If I were to tell you that I visited a regular doctor who prescribed a drug and I got better after taking that drug, then that too would prove nothing whatsoever. The only way to prove that a treatment is effective is to conduct scientific tests covering sufficient numbers of people to produce statistically significant results. Anecdotes merely muddy the waters.
Ah, right, that's why skeptics are literally raking in billions of dollars selling their books and skeptic products, and their faces are familiar to all of us from their constant appearances on prime-time TV.
Oh, no, wait a minute, that's the alternative practitioners, while skepticism remains largely unprofitable.
Actually, there is a useful meaning for this phrase. A "proven alternative treatment" is one that has been proven not to cause obvious harm to the patient. In other words, something like homeopathy or magnetic bandages that simply does nothing whatsoever.
Contrast with "experimental alternative treatment", which means eating a random herb and hoping it isn't poisonous.
Maybe that's the case in a profit-oriented system like in the USA. Other countries have evil socialist healthcare systems that mean that doctors have no incentive whatsoever to prescribe the most expensive treatment or to prolong your treatment unnecessarily, so they concentrate on doing their job properly instead.
Great idea! And given our global history of perfect peaceful cooperation, I'm sure we'll have no trouble at all persuading every single country in the world to collect one penny from every email sender.
Not since 1999, which was the last time I had more free time than sense. There's no real reason to any more. For the few cases where the distro doesn't provide a perfectly adequate kernel, there are generally third-party packages available that are reasonably well tested and integrated with the regular update system. (Example: Adamm's kernel for Ubuntu on EeePCs.)
Well said. Now I wish I hadn't wasted all my mod points in the holy-font article.
Indeed, only last week I listened to a radio programme on the official state broadcaster whose host was openly mocking the Queen's accent. If mobs have marched through London demanding blood, then they have somehow managed to escape the notice of the world's media.
Or you could look back at all the fuss there was about that documentary a while back where the trailer was edited in such a way as to suggest that the Queen walked out of an interview in a huff. There was a little anger, and a lot of mildly critical media coverage. The boss at whose desk the buck stopped resigned. So far he hasn't been murdered.
Ooh, ooh, I know this one!
If your iPhone has a hinge, I think you may just have been ripped off by an unscrupulous and rather lazy counterfeiter.
2^64 + 2^64 = 2^65
No more intense than everyone else who stood up in the spotlight. Doesn't the public have a right to know whether the claims people are making are true or not? And it was the press as much as Obama who went and investigated. I don't think we really want to discourage our free press from investigating claims that someone is trying to use to influence a presidential election, do we?
So, not everything they uncovered was nice. That's not their fault. If you want to stand up and complain about taxes, it helps if you've actually paid them. Joe the plumber learned that the hard way.
Joe the plumber had the right to speak freely, he exercised that right, and nobody did anything to restrain him or to prevent him having plenty of media exposure where he was positively encouraged to go into great detail about his beliefs.
He got a massive audience for his speech, which is way more than the First Amendment guarantees.
So there were bad consequences? Too bad. The First Amendment says nothing, nothing at all, about the consequences of exercising your right. All it says is that Congress can't make any laws taking that right away.
Perhaps you would have better luck if you tried Codeweavers' commercial products instead of relying on the free Wine. Free software is usually driven by the needs and desires of the people who are developing it. Codeweavers, on the other hand, are partly driven by a commercial need to sell stuff and find new customers. They have professional support staff instead of a faceless bug database. They also provide you with an opportunity to put your money where your mouth is, and say how valuable those apps are to you in dollars.
This is all useless if your motivation for using Linux is that you want stuff for free, of course, but those of us who use Linux for technical or (some) political reasons appreciate it.
That's BS, and you know it.
They have not yet achieved 100% compatibility with Win32, and therefore it is natural and proper that they need to produce a compatibility list, because that's useful for people who want to know whether such-and-such a program works or not.
Your C++ analogy is nonsensical. C++ has a well-documented specification, and compliance can be proven by listing how well your compiler conforms to the specification; C++ programs are generally written based on the specification, and rarely take advantage of undocumented quirks of a single specific compiler. This is not remotely comparable to the situation with Windows.
And Wine is much more than a collection of application-specific hacks. I have successfully used it to run proprietary Windows programs that no Wine developer has even heard of; they don't all work, but many run flawlessly.
"Perl or Python?" is like "awk or sed?". They solve different problems. They're suited to different tasks. For the parts where they overlap, though, there are various arguments either way. There's a reason why there are flamewars about this stuff. You get flamewars when the arguments on both sides are evenly matched, and the choice therefore becomes a religious issue.
Perl has some advantages. It has anonymous functions that aren't crippled. It has predictable lexical scoping. It has (optional) variable declarations. It has more libraries, and a very convenient standard way of installing them. It's available on any Unix system, whereas Python programmers are frequently reduced to begging sysadmins to install their favourite language. (And sysadmins frequently prefer Perl...)
Perl also has disadvantages: cryptic syntax, too much magic DWIM stuff, no standard way of doing OOP, etc. Note that these are all areas where Python is strong; if you care about consistency, Python is going to be a better choice for you personally.
Neither is a clear winner on performance; Perl is faster for some things, Python for others.
"Signals" for "sigils", describing ClearCase as a "rear-vision control system"... was this article dictated over a noisy phone line to someone who knows nothing about computers?
If the final spreadsheet format is XLS, then you can use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel to apply all the formatting within your Perl script, and avoid all the problems inherent to CSV like poor Unicode support and the inability to specify things like number formats.
One of the few cases where an Excel format is actually vaguely convenient to use. I don't know if there's an ODF equivalent yet.
Not really. Oh, sure, OS X is a certified UNIX(r) and all that, but the UNIX bit is a subset of the complete OS X, and there isn't much of a visible intersection between the UNIX bit and the bit that most Mac users actually use from day to day, which is built on a whole bunch of proprietary Mac-specific stuff like Quartz that has nothing whatsoever to do with UNIX.
No, but you can use an external USB one.
That's a definite "yes", not a "maybe". You just use something like unetbootin to copy the live CD to a USB stick, then boot from that. It's all GUI-driven, so it's pretty straightforward.
Better than Vista doesn't necessarily mean better than Windows; among EeePC users, the general experience is that Windows XP can get at least an hour more battery life than Ubuntu, though last time I checked Intel were working pretty hard to close the gap.
Linux can still be preferable for other reasons, though. It's got a better security record and is a much less attractive hacker target, which is rather nice on a device that you're constantly going to be using at untrusted wifi hotspots. It's more flexible in many ways, too -- for example, the Windows interface really doesn't work at all well on a netbook-sized screen, but X11 can be configured in many different ways to give you something comfortable.
Oh, and it's Linux, which for any true nerd is an advantage in itself. ;)
Well, you should be able to. There should be a "Warning: Contains Marketing" statement, alongside the warnings about violent content or bad language.
Personally I'm far more concerned about our children being exposed to marketing in video games than I am about violence or anything else that the media have moral panics about. Childhood exposure to Coca-Cola marketing and McDonalds marketing is the direct cause of many serious health problems. Childhood exposure to nipples has not been proven to have any negative effect at all (in fact, breastfeeding proponents seem to argue it's a good thing). So the ESRB and their counterparts in other countries should be putting a very prominent warning on the packaging when a game contains these nasty messages that are teaching our children to poison themselves.
I will accept a game that has billboards with ads for Coca-Cola -- if and only if that same game, in the same play session, also contains billboards with ads for Pepsi.
That would be realistic, and would therefore add to immersion and enhance the game.
What, the Coca-Cola marketing board don't like the idea? Too bad. I guess I won't play that game then.
"Fact"? What "fact" is this? The publishers may have claimed that the ads will not be intrusive, but just saying something doesn't make it true. Marketers are lying scum, and like all liars, the things they say tend not to be true.
The fact is that advertisements and product placement are nearly always intrusive.
So... when King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, once the absolute ruler of Bhutan, unilaterally and voluntarily decided to set up a democratic system of government, and then abdicated ... that somehow didn't count as a government significantly, permanently, and willingly reducing its level of power?
Which, of course, was by the same people as Thief (and even used the same engine).
Even Thief 3 did a pretty good job at horror with the Cradle, though the rest of the game wasn't really up to the standards of the first two.