I just had a vision where, in 2018, Coca-Cola is known as one of the most popular drinks in Europe and Asia... because in America it costs too much, so nobody really drinks it.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the ice cream debate rages on. Congress wants to raise federal taxes, but the States claim that the ice-cream tax is their sole purview. In Texas, making a root beer float is already a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,500 fine (debited automatically from your account).
Health care is not an entitlement or a right. You have to buy it, just like everything else.
Huh. So not you, nor I, nor anybody else is entitled to any kind of health care. Tell me: Are you, as a U.S. citizen, entitled to have the bodies hauled off the streets? Do you have a right to see them buried? Or should you have to buy that service, just like everything else?
Funny, cuz your response is exactly what I was going to ask of you. Until, that is, I learned you were just a drunk dude who was trying to sound intellectual. Thanks for being honest. And, cheers.
If I sell or give you a genuine boxed copy of Microsoft Windows(tm), what law am I breaking?
Possibly none. Microsoft might have a different opinion on the matter.
But these guys aren't selling you a genuine boxed copy of the Google apps. They're selling you unlicensed copies which carry the Google trade dress, including logos and other collateral.
You say, "So what? They're the same apps" -- which is exactly why trademark exists in the first place. Because it has registered trademarks, only Google is permitted to conduct trade using those marks. It doesn't matter if the binaries are bit-for-bit identical. Google gets to say whether the apps are "authentic" or not.
But GP was talking about Google logos etc. -- and in that case, it's a trademark issue. If Google allows third parties to ship binary applications complete with Google trade dress, it risks losing its trademarks. Trademark law requires you to defend your trademarks to prove that you still want them; otherwise they revert to public domain.
If there was a way for the modded OS to include versions of Google's apps recompiled with all the trademarked icons etc. removed, they could change the name to "IceGeeMail" or something, and they'd be in the clear. But there's no way to do that, since these are closed-source apps, so we're back to the aforementioned copyright issue.
So you could argue that the folks at Google are kinda being dicks about the whole thing, but to be fair, they hardly have any choice in the matter.
Heh. I said to master. I'm assuming you're going to a math class twice a week, and you'll need to encounter a few different types of problems to really get a feel for how RPN calculators differ from the others you may have used.
...I can't see how anyone could expect Microsoft to act differently.
There appears to be a legal loophole that has allowed Microsoft to hang onto $707 million over the years. Until a judge rules otherwise, they're going to exploit that loophole. When the loophole is closed, Microsoft is going to look for a new one. Can you say you'd act any differently?
What's that? You do act differently? You pay your taxes, you say? Well then... it sounds as though Washington would have better luck recouping its money if it simply raised the state income tax. Presumably all of the employees at Microsoft's Redmond campus file taxes in the state, yes?
Marvel only ever went bankrupt once, and I think you'll find that happened in large part because they were caught in the crossfire between billionaire corporate raiders Carl Icahn and Ronald Perelman. Generally, over the years their comic book publishing business has always been pretty sound and profitable; it's been their other ventures that have put them in difficult financial straits.
I wrote this, because it's my belief having a permanent aristocracy is poison to a country and not in anyone's best interest, and large scale inheritances perpetuate a permanent upper class.
Permanent?
Never underestimate the ability of your lazy, talentless heirs to squander everything you spent your whole life working for.
I had a periodic-table program for my 50g that was a lifesaver in chemistry class. Imagine typing in any chemical formula on the fly and instantly being given the molecular weight. And no, it's not "cheating"! The student gains absolutely zero benefit from adding up the weights of complex formulas during a two-hour college chemistry test. There are far too many other things to worry about. Actually, use of calculators in my class was completely unrestricted. You didn't even have to show your work! But if you didn't show any work, there was no way to give you partial credit if you got the answer wrong...
...but you'd be a fool not to switch over to RPN as soon as you open the box. It takes about two weeks to master, after which you'll wonder how you ever used a non-RPN calculator before.
Well, it's all well and fine until it's something YOU could make money off of..
Sounds like a market failure to me. True, Malaysians were buying knockoff DVDs -- but note, they were buying them. In many cases, the products in question weren't available through legitimate channels at any price. In my case, the products in question weren't even available in the U.S. In fact, I still can't buy a copy of the original "Star Wars" without getting a copy of the computer-altered version along with it, and the sound and picture on the original movie are inferior to the version I don't want to see.
Then again, many of the DVDs for sale were cams of first-run movies. But someone was making money off them -- why couldn't the studios? Perhaps the answer is that they weren't willing to accept profit margins as low as the Malaysian bootleggers'. Still, the idea that you're going to turn an entire nation with its own culture into American-style consumers who pay U.S. prices just because you say so strikes me as naïve in the extreme.
The TI-89 has better numeric capabilities, great graphing ability, and a nice display. It can also run for months on a single pair of AA batteries.
Actually, the TI-89 uses four AAA batteries, but the point is made.
Also, many colleges and standardized tests require students to use calculators rather than other devices because they are (at least nominally) limited to calculation. So far, at least, you can't surf Wikipedia for answers on a calculator. The TI-92 calculator is actually forbidden by some tests, despite the fact that it's functionally equivalent to the TI-89, because it has a QWERTY keyboard, which makes it a "computer."
I find it interesting that Malaysia would be claiming there should be copyright protection for foods, when there isn't any kind of copyright protection for anything else in that country/region -- not in any real sense.
This isn't a troll -- just try going to any market in Malaysia. You'll find whole tables of knockoff DVDs, knockoff Paul Frank T-shirts, knockoff shoes, knockoff handbags... the average person sees nothing wrong with it.
I once went to a DVD store in a mall on the island of Penang, off the west coast of Malaysia, probably around 2002. I mean this was a real store with one of those roll-down metal cages that go in front of the plate glass windows when they close shop, inside a real mall with a food court and everything. This store had one small bookcase full of legitimate, imported American DVDs. The entire rest of the store was given over to knockoffs. You could get DVD-5 copies for about $5 and the DVD-9s were about $8. They were well aware what they were doing; they even had DVD players and TVs on hand so you could double-check the video quality of the copies you were buying. I picked up a set of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD-9, plus a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In passing, I told one of the kids working there (he was wearing a polo shirt with the store's logo on it) that you couldn't buy any of these movies in America (at that time, none of them was available on DVD). He looked at me like I'd just told him I'd never seen rice before.
Mind you, technically it was all illegal. Malaysia actually seemed to have a pretty strong force of "copyright cops" that would do sweeps for pirated DVDs. The problem was that copyright law was one of those laws that was so poorly respected by the average citizen -- basically, everybody living in Malaysia had broken it at least once, and probably did so routinely -- that there was absolutely no respect for enforcement, which in turn leads to corruption. Everybody involved in the knock-off trade seemed to have a contact who would tip them off when a sting was about to happen. I met some Australian tourists who were hoping to go to the DVD store I mentioned, but when they went (on a Wednesday afternoon) it was closed. Apparently they had been warned not to open that day. Similarly, even guys who were hawking their wares on blankets at the night markets would occasionally get calls on their cell phones, then immediately roll up their bundles and walk away while customers were still waving money.
Still, no doubt this effort by the Malaysian government does a couple things:
It gets some attention for local cuisine, which isn't as well-known outside the region as (say) Thai food
It gives Malaysia brownie points with the Western countries for acting like they really care about intellectual property law
Personally, though, I doubt the average Malaysian cares much more about it than Americans care when we find out our home city is now "the sister city of Vladivostok." Sounds great, but what difference does it make to me?
I don't believe that he meant everyone like everyone in the world, just everyone from/.
Maybe so, but I don't recall seeing any video ads from any of these companies.
I agree with the GP; "Everyone is [fill in the blank]" is just bad writing. There has never been anything in the history of humankind that "everyone" has agreed upon. Statements like these tune the reader out immediately, because they sound suspiciously like the beginning of a fallacious argument or a ploy: "Everyone agrees that bright red pants are the only pants worth wearing, but is the fact that bright red pants are so incredibly popular actually putting colorblind people at a disadvantage? We spoke to Ron Smith, CEO of Ron's Pants Inc., the company responsible for shipping 90 percent of pants sold in this phenomenally desirable color..."
Oh -- and as long as we're giving medical advice, a lot of the reason why people think the treatment has failed is because the symptoms persist after they've applied the treatment and they become paranoid. The treatment is essentially a chemical insecticide, like RAID. Seriously. You leave it on your skin for 8-10 hours. Naturally a chemical like that is going to inflame your skin somewhat. That means it makes you itch, kinda like scabies does. Even worse, you've killed the bugs, but the bugs are still in your skin -- and like I said, the welts and itching are not caused by bug bites, but by an immune reaction. You will get the same immune reaction from dead bugs as from live bugs. Thus, even though you've killed the bugs, it takes several days for you to shed enough layers of skin to get rid of the dead bugs. In the meantime, you might still see symptoms. This is where the paranoia and the delusional parasitosis comes in. You still itch, so you apply more medicine, which makes you itch worse, which makes you think it's not working.... just chill out. It worked the first time. It just takes a few days for the symptoms to go away. And especially, please, PLEASE don't believe the crazy tales you read on the Internet.
For the scabies bit. The 10% that fail is usually from reinfection from the house and clothing.
That's true -- and, if anyone out there is sufferin'... believe me, just wash everything. People will tell you that you need to throw away all your clothes. It's not true. The scabies organism is really fragile. It can NOT survive a roll in the clothes washer. It can only survive for a few hours off a human being -- a day at most. If you don't trust that you can kill them all, spend a few days in a hotel while you're washing your clothes. Left without human bodies to jump on, the ones back at your home will all die. Most scabies infections are actually fairly mild (compared to something like bed bugs), unless you're immune compromised. Most people who have scabies, even if they are covered with itchy welts, only have 3-4 bugs on their entire body. The welts are caused by an immune reaction, not by "bug bites." Put the prescription lotion on before you go to bed, sleep for a normal number of hours, and the ones on your body will be dead by morning. Then wash all your clothes and your sheets, vacuum your carpets, and you should be fine.
I agree. The GP sounds like he has a very narrow view of how medicine is actually practiced, probably because he quit going to doctors a while ago.
I don't have what I'd call a "personal physician," but I have a doctor's office that I've been to now and again for various things. Mostly I never see my doctor because I'm a 36-year-old male with few risk factors in my lifestyle or my medical history, and mainly I'm in fine health. When I do see my doctor, the conversation probably lasts about eight minutes. But pretty much every time I've been to the doctor's office, no matter what my problem was, the session is concluded with a few questions, along the lines of: "How is everything else? How's work? Do you like your job? Is it stressful? Do you exercise much?" He clearly understands that there are aspects to human health that aren't strictly chemical.
At the same time, unlike the so-called alternative practitioners, he's willing (and able) to write me prescriptions for real, working medicines when he thinks I'll benefit from them. I caught a sinus infection once that was giving me one-sided headaches that would come on every time I ate and would get so bad that I had to leave my desk at work and lie down. This went on for weeks. By the time someone convinced me to go to the doctor, I was so tired, weak, and sick of pain that I barely bothered to make myself food once I got home from work -- I just went to bed, or passed out on the couch. What could herbal medicine have done for that? It was an infection. What lifestyle change could I have made? But once the doctor prescribed me a course of antibiotics -- the evil, over-prescribed bugbear of the healthcare industrial complex -- I was back up on my feet in less than two days. No more headaches. Problem solved. I kicked myself over how much time I wasted avoiding legitimate medical care.
Another time, I caught scabies, a skin parasite. I have no idea how I got it. But try going online and finding home remedies for it. Find the message boards for "scabies sufferers." The stuff you'll find is frightening: Douse your skin with bleach. Scrub it with rock salt. Scrub it with Comet cleanser. Shave off the affected areas with razor blades. Dig them out from under your fingernails. Find the burrows and dig them out with X-Acto knives. Make your own medicines from ingredients you can buy through livestock veterinary supply wholesalers (I'm not kidding). The actual treatment that most doctors will prescribe is a cream, which you apply to your entire body and leave on for ten hours. This treatment cures as many as 90 percent of patients after exactly one application -- that's right, do it right once and you're cured. Compare that to the suffering that people who don't believe in doctors or medicine might endure.
Do you see my point? No good doctor is going to tell you that every health problem in the world can be solved with medicines. But the alternative, too often, is people who have gotten it into their head that modern medicine is never the solution. I think the latter attitude does people a far greater disservice.
Maybe it was the placebo effect, who knows. But do you think we care?
Wow, I should hope you care.
Suppose you'd never heard the word "placebo" before. Suppose you didn't know what it meant. And every month your dad would go in to the doctor's, and the doctor would say, "You're coming along nicely. You're doing much better than we predicted." And your dad says, "But doc, I feel terrible!" And the doctor says, "Don't worry, we're going to increase your dose of placebo. You're still way below a toxic dosage. A little more placebo and I think you'll get great results."
Then one day you're out at a bar, and you meet a doctor. And the doctor tells you what "placebo" actually means. How would you feel about it then? Would you think, "Gosh, this placebo is wonderful! I'd better be sure to keep it under my hat, though, because if my dad ever found out what placebo means, the whole treatment could fail!" Or would you run out of the bar, head straight for the doctor's office, and break his jaw?
I understand that you're sensitive about this issue, but you only "don't care" if your dad received a legitimate therapy or not because you're convinced that he did.
However, the judge and the BCA took him to be saying that the BCA are knowingly and intentionally dishonest in their promotion of the treatment.
I wouldn't think to interpret "bogus" in this way, but that seems to be the original meaning. I hope the judge realizes Singh was using it in a more modern sense
Says who? It seems reasonable enough to assume that if Singh can find no evidence that chiropractic works, he must think practitioners of chiropractic must either be A.) hopelessly naïve, or B.) knowingly and intentionally dishonest. If he's really claiming A, then maybe to avoid this suit he should point out who it was that knowingly, intentionally, and dishonestly suckered the practitioners?
What I find confusing is the idea that it's possible to libel a group in the first place. If I say "people with disabilities can't run as fast as able-bodied people," can I be sued by the Special Olympics? If I say "women shouldn't be firefighters because they can't lift as much weight as men," can I be sued by every female on planet Earth, one at a time, until some court somewhere grants them a judgment? If I say "water-boarding is torture and the people who inflict it on prisoners are war criminals," can I be sued by the U.S. government in British court? Where does it end?
They reviewed the advertisements with their clients directly. There were a few hundred per day and it was a manageable problem. Now, advertisements may be served by proxies and selected from among tens of thousands of potential ads, designed to be targeted to readers in specific geographic regions, income levels, purchasing habits, interests, age categories, gender, education level, or other factors.
Surely a good ad proxy works something like an online dating service? If they're just throwing anything and everything at you, why use a middleman in the first place? So what criteria made them think these particular ads were acceptable for a major newspaper? Personally, I don't consider them acceptable for any site (and yes, I've seen the ads in question on the Times -- my reaction when I saw them was to immediately run a spyware scan, which turned up negative).
And God help us if the New York Times is so desperate for cash that it can't rap its ad partners' knuckles when they screw up. How would you like to be the ad-serving agency that has to tell its clients, "We just lost the New York Times?" If you won't give a client of that stature the full red-carpet treatment, you deserve to go out of business. But by the same token, if the Times won't exercise its clout as a customer, then it deserves all the blame we can heap on it.
Hopefully the paper will run a statement addressing this issue on Monday and it won't be an issue any longer.
Review of each possible advertisement would be onerous
Seriously? So we're OK with major newspapers having absolutely no standards at all these days? What do you suppose people did back in the days before you could get ads via RSS feed?
Slashdot Mirror
I just had a vision where, in 2018, Coca-Cola is known as one of the most popular drinks in Europe and Asia ... because in America it costs too much, so nobody really drinks it.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the ice cream debate rages on. Congress wants to raise federal taxes, but the States claim that the ice-cream tax is their sole purview. In Texas, making a root beer float is already a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,500 fine (debited automatically from your account).
Health care is not an entitlement or a right. You have to buy it, just like everything else.
Huh. So not you, nor I, nor anybody else is entitled to any kind of health care. Tell me: Are you, as a U.S. citizen, entitled to have the bodies hauled off the streets? Do you have a right to see them buried? Or should you have to buy that service, just like everything else?
Funny, cuz your response is exactly what I was going to ask of you. Until, that is, I learned you were just a drunk dude who was trying to sound intellectual. Thanks for being honest. And, cheers.
If I sell or give you a genuine boxed copy of Microsoft Windows(tm), what law am I breaking?
Possibly none. Microsoft might have a different opinion on the matter.
But these guys aren't selling you a genuine boxed copy of the Google apps. They're selling you unlicensed copies which carry the Google trade dress, including logos and other collateral.
You say, "So what? They're the same apps" -- which is exactly why trademark exists in the first place. Because it has registered trademarks, only Google is permitted to conduct trade using those marks. It doesn't matter if the binaries are bit-for-bit identical. Google gets to say whether the apps are "authentic" or not.
Right, and that's a legitimate copyright issue.
But GP was talking about Google logos etc. -- and in that case, it's a trademark issue. If Google allows third parties to ship binary applications complete with Google trade dress, it risks losing its trademarks. Trademark law requires you to defend your trademarks to prove that you still want them; otherwise they revert to public domain.
If there was a way for the modded OS to include versions of Google's apps recompiled with all the trademarked icons etc. removed, they could change the name to "IceGeeMail" or something, and they'd be in the clear. But there's no way to do that, since these are closed-source apps, so we're back to the aforementioned copyright issue.
So you could argue that the folks at Google are kinda being dicks about the whole thing, but to be fair, they hardly have any choice in the matter.
Heh. I said to master. I'm assuming you're going to a math class twice a week, and you'll need to encounter a few different types of problems to really get a feel for how RPN calculators differ from the others you may have used.
...I can't see how anyone could expect Microsoft to act differently.
There appears to be a legal loophole that has allowed Microsoft to hang onto $707 million over the years. Until a judge rules otherwise, they're going to exploit that loophole. When the loophole is closed, Microsoft is going to look for a new one. Can you say you'd act any differently?
What's that? You do act differently? You pay your taxes, you say? Well then... it sounds as though Washington would have better luck recouping its money if it simply raised the state income tax. Presumably all of the employees at Microsoft's Redmond campus file taxes in the state, yes?
Marvel only ever went bankrupt once, and I think you'll find that happened in large part because they were caught in the crossfire between billionaire corporate raiders Carl Icahn and Ronald Perelman. Generally, over the years their comic book publishing business has always been pretty sound and profitable; it's been their other ventures that have put them in difficult financial straits.
I wrote this, because it's my belief having a permanent aristocracy is poison to a country and not in anyone's best interest, and large scale inheritances perpetuate a permanent upper class.
Permanent?
Never underestimate the ability of your lazy, talentless heirs to squander everything you spent your whole life working for.
Cry me a river. I bet if I went to Hong Kong I could buy Top Ramen for 1/8 of one cent instead of the 15 cents I pay now.
I had a periodic-table program for my 50g that was a lifesaver in chemistry class. Imagine typing in any chemical formula on the fly and instantly being given the molecular weight. And no, it's not "cheating"! The student gains absolutely zero benefit from adding up the weights of complex formulas during a two-hour college chemistry test. There are far too many other things to worry about. Actually, use of calculators in my class was completely unrestricted. You didn't even have to show your work! But if you didn't show any work, there was no way to give you partial credit if you got the answer wrong...
RPN is optional in most newer HP calcs.
...but you'd be a fool not to switch over to RPN as soon as you open the box. It takes about two weeks to master, after which you'll wonder how you ever used a non-RPN calculator before.
Well, it's all well and fine until it's something YOU could make money off of..
Sounds like a market failure to me. True, Malaysians were buying knockoff DVDs -- but note, they were buying them. In many cases, the products in question weren't available through legitimate channels at any price. In my case, the products in question weren't even available in the U.S. In fact, I still can't buy a copy of the original "Star Wars" without getting a copy of the computer-altered version along with it, and the sound and picture on the original movie are inferior to the version I don't want to see.
Then again, many of the DVDs for sale were cams of first-run movies. But someone was making money off them -- why couldn't the studios? Perhaps the answer is that they weren't willing to accept profit margins as low as the Malaysian bootleggers'. Still, the idea that you're going to turn an entire nation with its own culture into American-style consumers who pay U.S. prices just because you say so strikes me as naïve in the extreme.
The TI-89 has better numeric capabilities, great graphing ability, and a nice display. It can also run for months on a single pair of AA batteries.
Actually, the TI-89 uses four AAA batteries, but the point is made.
Also, many colleges and standardized tests require students to use calculators rather than other devices because they are (at least nominally) limited to calculation. So far, at least, you can't surf Wikipedia for answers on a calculator. The TI-92 calculator is actually forbidden by some tests, despite the fact that it's functionally equivalent to the TI-89, because it has a QWERTY keyboard, which makes it a "computer."
I find it interesting that Malaysia would be claiming there should be copyright protection for foods, when there isn't any kind of copyright protection for anything else in that country/region -- not in any real sense.
This isn't a troll -- just try going to any market in Malaysia. You'll find whole tables of knockoff DVDs, knockoff Paul Frank T-shirts, knockoff shoes, knockoff handbags ... the average person sees nothing wrong with it.
I once went to a DVD store in a mall on the island of Penang, off the west coast of Malaysia, probably around 2002. I mean this was a real store with one of those roll-down metal cages that go in front of the plate glass windows when they close shop, inside a real mall with a food court and everything. This store had one small bookcase full of legitimate, imported American DVDs. The entire rest of the store was given over to knockoffs. You could get DVD-5 copies for about $5 and the DVD-9s were about $8. They were well aware what they were doing; they even had DVD players and TVs on hand so you could double-check the video quality of the copies you were buying. I picked up a set of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD-9, plus a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In passing, I told one of the kids working there (he was wearing a polo shirt with the store's logo on it) that you couldn't buy any of these movies in America (at that time, none of them was available on DVD). He looked at me like I'd just told him I'd never seen rice before.
Mind you, technically it was all illegal. Malaysia actually seemed to have a pretty strong force of "copyright cops" that would do sweeps for pirated DVDs. The problem was that copyright law was one of those laws that was so poorly respected by the average citizen -- basically, everybody living in Malaysia had broken it at least once, and probably did so routinely -- that there was absolutely no respect for enforcement, which in turn leads to corruption. Everybody involved in the knock-off trade seemed to have a contact who would tip them off when a sting was about to happen. I met some Australian tourists who were hoping to go to the DVD store I mentioned, but when they went (on a Wednesday afternoon) it was closed. Apparently they had been warned not to open that day. Similarly, even guys who were hawking their wares on blankets at the night markets would occasionally get calls on their cell phones, then immediately roll up their bundles and walk away while customers were still waving money.
Still, no doubt this effort by the Malaysian government does a couple things:
Personally, though, I doubt the average Malaysian cares much more about it than Americans care when we find out our home city is now "the sister city of Vladivostok." Sounds great, but what difference does it make to me?
I don't believe that he meant everyone like everyone in the world, just everyone from /.
Maybe so, but I don't recall seeing any video ads from any of these companies.
I agree with the GP; "Everyone is [fill in the blank]" is just bad writing. There has never been anything in the history of humankind that "everyone" has agreed upon. Statements like these tune the reader out immediately, because they sound suspiciously like the beginning of a fallacious argument or a ploy: "Everyone agrees that bright red pants are the only pants worth wearing, but is the fact that bright red pants are so incredibly popular actually putting colorblind people at a disadvantage? We spoke to Ron Smith, CEO of Ron's Pants Inc., the company responsible for shipping 90 percent of pants sold in this phenomenally desirable color..."
Oh -- and as long as we're giving medical advice, a lot of the reason why people think the treatment has failed is because the symptoms persist after they've applied the treatment and they become paranoid. The treatment is essentially a chemical insecticide, like RAID. Seriously. You leave it on your skin for 8-10 hours. Naturally a chemical like that is going to inflame your skin somewhat. That means it makes you itch, kinda like scabies does. Even worse, you've killed the bugs, but the bugs are still in your skin -- and like I said, the welts and itching are not caused by bug bites, but by an immune reaction. You will get the same immune reaction from dead bugs as from live bugs. Thus, even though you've killed the bugs, it takes several days for you to shed enough layers of skin to get rid of the dead bugs. In the meantime, you might still see symptoms. This is where the paranoia and the delusional parasitosis comes in. You still itch, so you apply more medicine, which makes you itch worse, which makes you think it's not working.... just chill out. It worked the first time. It just takes a few days for the symptoms to go away. And especially, please, PLEASE don't believe the crazy tales you read on the Internet.
For the scabies bit. The 10% that fail is usually from reinfection from the house and clothing.
That's true -- and, if anyone out there is sufferin' ... believe me, just wash everything. People will tell you that you need to throw away all your clothes. It's not true. The scabies organism is really fragile. It can NOT survive a roll in the clothes washer. It can only survive for a few hours off a human being -- a day at most. If you don't trust that you can kill them all, spend a few days in a hotel while you're washing your clothes. Left without human bodies to jump on, the ones back at your home will all die. Most scabies infections are actually fairly mild (compared to something like bed bugs), unless you're immune compromised. Most people who have scabies, even if they are covered with itchy welts, only have 3-4 bugs on their entire body. The welts are caused by an immune reaction, not by "bug bites." Put the prescription lotion on before you go to bed, sleep for a normal number of hours, and the ones on your body will be dead by morning. Then wash all your clothes and your sheets, vacuum your carpets, and you should be fine.
Well, by definition, if you don't believe chiropractic works then being told to see a chiropractor is crazy Internet advice (and a waste of money).
I agree. The GP sounds like he has a very narrow view of how medicine is actually practiced, probably because he quit going to doctors a while ago.
I don't have what I'd call a "personal physician," but I have a doctor's office that I've been to now and again for various things. Mostly I never see my doctor because I'm a 36-year-old male with few risk factors in my lifestyle or my medical history, and mainly I'm in fine health. When I do see my doctor, the conversation probably lasts about eight minutes. But pretty much every time I've been to the doctor's office, no matter what my problem was, the session is concluded with a few questions, along the lines of: "How is everything else? How's work? Do you like your job? Is it stressful? Do you exercise much?" He clearly understands that there are aspects to human health that aren't strictly chemical.
At the same time, unlike the so-called alternative practitioners, he's willing (and able) to write me prescriptions for real, working medicines when he thinks I'll benefit from them. I caught a sinus infection once that was giving me one-sided headaches that would come on every time I ate and would get so bad that I had to leave my desk at work and lie down. This went on for weeks. By the time someone convinced me to go to the doctor, I was so tired, weak, and sick of pain that I barely bothered to make myself food once I got home from work -- I just went to bed, or passed out on the couch. What could herbal medicine have done for that? It was an infection. What lifestyle change could I have made? But once the doctor prescribed me a course of antibiotics -- the evil, over-prescribed bugbear of the healthcare industrial complex -- I was back up on my feet in less than two days. No more headaches. Problem solved. I kicked myself over how much time I wasted avoiding legitimate medical care.
Another time, I caught scabies, a skin parasite. I have no idea how I got it. But try going online and finding home remedies for it. Find the message boards for "scabies sufferers." The stuff you'll find is frightening: Douse your skin with bleach. Scrub it with rock salt. Scrub it with Comet cleanser. Shave off the affected areas with razor blades. Dig them out from under your fingernails. Find the burrows and dig them out with X-Acto knives. Make your own medicines from ingredients you can buy through livestock veterinary supply wholesalers (I'm not kidding). The actual treatment that most doctors will prescribe is a cream, which you apply to your entire body and leave on for ten hours. This treatment cures as many as 90 percent of patients after exactly one application -- that's right, do it right once and you're cured. Compare that to the suffering that people who don't believe in doctors or medicine might endure.
Do you see my point? No good doctor is going to tell you that every health problem in the world can be solved with medicines. But the alternative, too often, is people who have gotten it into their head that modern medicine is never the solution. I think the latter attitude does people a far greater disservice.
Maybe it was the placebo effect, who knows. But do you think we care?
Wow, I should hope you care.
Suppose you'd never heard the word "placebo" before. Suppose you didn't know what it meant. And every month your dad would go in to the doctor's, and the doctor would say, "You're coming along nicely. You're doing much better than we predicted." And your dad says, "But doc, I feel terrible!" And the doctor says, "Don't worry, we're going to increase your dose of placebo. You're still way below a toxic dosage. A little more placebo and I think you'll get great results."
Then one day you're out at a bar, and you meet a doctor. And the doctor tells you what "placebo" actually means. How would you feel about it then? Would you think, "Gosh, this placebo is wonderful! I'd better be sure to keep it under my hat, though, because if my dad ever found out what placebo means, the whole treatment could fail!" Or would you run out of the bar, head straight for the doctor's office, and break his jaw?
I understand that you're sensitive about this issue, but you only "don't care" if your dad received a legitimate therapy or not because you're convinced that he did.
An hypothesis is disproved through a variety of criteria in order to eliminate any potentially overlooked causal relationships.
And we've ruled out experimentation? We really can't use "When I did X, Y happened" as part of the criteria?
However, the judge and the BCA took him to be saying that the BCA are knowingly and intentionally dishonest in their promotion of the treatment.
I wouldn't think to interpret "bogus" in this way, but that seems to be the original meaning. I hope the judge realizes Singh was using it in a more modern sense
Says who? It seems reasonable enough to assume that if Singh can find no evidence that chiropractic works, he must think practitioners of chiropractic must either be A.) hopelessly naïve, or B.) knowingly and intentionally dishonest. If he's really claiming A, then maybe to avoid this suit he should point out who it was that knowingly, intentionally, and dishonestly suckered the practitioners?
What I find confusing is the idea that it's possible to libel a group in the first place. If I say "people with disabilities can't run as fast as able-bodied people," can I be sued by the Special Olympics? If I say "women shouldn't be firefighters because they can't lift as much weight as men," can I be sued by every female on planet Earth, one at a time, until some court somewhere grants them a judgment? If I say "water-boarding is torture and the people who inflict it on prisoners are war criminals," can I be sued by the U.S. government in British court? Where does it end?
They reviewed the advertisements with their clients directly. There were a few hundred per day and it was a manageable problem. Now, advertisements may be served by proxies and selected from among tens of thousands of potential ads, designed to be targeted to readers in specific geographic regions, income levels, purchasing habits, interests, age categories, gender, education level, or other factors.
Surely a good ad proxy works something like an online dating service? If they're just throwing anything and everything at you, why use a middleman in the first place? So what criteria made them think these particular ads were acceptable for a major newspaper? Personally, I don't consider them acceptable for any site (and yes, I've seen the ads in question on the Times -- my reaction when I saw them was to immediately run a spyware scan, which turned up negative).
And God help us if the New York Times is so desperate for cash that it can't rap its ad partners' knuckles when they screw up. How would you like to be the ad-serving agency that has to tell its clients, "We just lost the New York Times?" If you won't give a client of that stature the full red-carpet treatment, you deserve to go out of business. But by the same token, if the Times won't exercise its clout as a customer, then it deserves all the blame we can heap on it.
Hopefully the paper will run a statement addressing this issue on Monday and it won't be an issue any longer.
Review of each possible advertisement would be onerous
Seriously? So we're OK with major newspapers having absolutely no standards at all these days? What do you suppose people did back in the days before you could get ads via RSS feed?