Though a lot of it isn't too... it sure took western medicine awhile to figure out that acupuncture, for example, has any benefits (and I believe it still can't explain why it does, can it?). So prior to what, 1990 or whatever, how would you know?
I can't speak on the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture (or lack thereof). It's certainly true that investigating things and gathering factual evidence takes longer than simply doing stuff without gathering evidence, but the trade-off is that the results are better (on average). I mean, if a police officer is investigating a crime it's obviously faster to simply pick one of the people who is believed to have been present and say they are guilty rather than gathering evidence and doing an investigation. And some of the time, this method will get the right person. The downside of this method of police work is that most of the time the officer will get the wrong man. The same applies to medicine.
Sometimes, you DO have to go with "what you feel". Cause, you know, we haven't figured it all out yet. And pay attention to what you're feeling, and try to figure out if it's real or not.
This is often not a good strategy. In some cases the wrong choice may cause actual damage or simply allow an existing condition to get worse. Even in a more favorable situation where you assume that failure will be benign, it's often just hard to tell whether or not the treatment worked. For example if you're experiencing back pain or you get a cold, these are conditions that can get better on their own due to your body's own restorative powers. If you take some remedy for them and then get better, you may attribute it to the remedy but it may have nothing to do with it.
One thing is for sure though... MOST alternative medicine techniques are at worst benign. Water potions, aromatherapy, meditation... you're not going to hurt anything doing these things. At worst you delayed real treatment for awhile trying something else out.
Again, this depends on the case. There are instances where people delay treatments for serious illnesses, like cancer, in favor of trying alternative cures. In that case there's the potential for serious consequences. When you're talking about things like cold remedies it can be that some ineffective alternative remedies are harmless, other than lost time and money and having to deal with whatever symptoms you were trying to treat longer. There certainly can be cases where, due to insufficient quality control or lack of appropriate labeling alternative medicine puts people in some danger. For example, some fish and shell fish derived remedies are very high in mercury. Another example is ear candling, which can result in people getting burned by hot wax, which, when it happens inside the ear canal, can have serious consequences.
Compare that to pills, and medical treatments in general. Pills almost all have unpleasant side effects (ask any pharmacist... many times, people come back to take pills to fix the stuff the first pills broke). 30% misdiagnosis rates. Surgery and anesthesia risks, addictions, you name it.
Yes, I agree that many medical treatments have significant side effects, and when choosing a treatment that should certainly be taken into account. I don't see any reason to believe that in general alternative medicine will not also have side effects. It's logical to expect that an effective treatment is likely to have side effects, because generally you'd be extraordinarily lucky to discover a technique that only has exactly the effects you want and no others. In addition, in medical testing even the placebo has side effects, due to psychosomatic response. One advantage of traditional medicine, however, is that the side effects are studied and you can be well informed about your choices going in.
Now, there certainly is one class of remedies that won't have si
What if the drug companies manipulate government and media to push drugs, vacinations, medicine, on people for profit. What if those users would really be more safe and healthy without it? Isn't it possible that a alarmist less accurate youtube video could spur people to have a more healthy skepticism when it comes to what they put in their bodies?
Well, by that time it will be too late, because the fluoride powered transmitter in your tooth will have alerted the authorities to your plans, and the black helicopters will already be on their way to pick you up.
You can be skeptical of the motives of drug companies, the media, or whomever, but you should not abandon reason or the scientific method, which is where a lot of the critics of "mainstream medicine" go off the deep end. You still should realize that the human body is a complex system and, thus, doing medicine requires significant education and expertise and learning anything about a system requires systematic, controlled experiments done on a large sample with rigorous data analysis. What the amounts to is that you have to be fairly selective in whose advice you take, and, even if it isn't the NIH, logic dictates that it should probably be some other relatively large organization that has people with enough expertise and resources for the necessary testing.
The other key point is that however skeptical you are of the medical establishment you should be equally skeptical of anyone else who steps up to offer you an alternative. Sadly, such skepticism seems to be seldom applied to "alternative medicine".
You are probably breaking three or four laws right now and you do not even know it.
The township can make the guy's life hell-- can make his friend's lives hell so he loses his friends (assuming it is a guy).
This is very likely true. To amplify this point, I can say that in my town (a small town of a little over 1000 homes) there are many laws about all sorts of ridiculous minutiae that are only selectively enforced. These include laws that say, for example, that your trash cans can't be visible from the road (unless it's trash day), regulate the length of your grass, etc. As an experiment, one day I walked around my area of the town (which does not seem to be exceptional in any way) and looked for violations of the ordinances. I found roughly one half of the houses I passed had a violation readily apparently from walking by on the road, and that was only based on the ones I remember off the top of my head. This completely ignores other issues like applying for permits, traffic tickets, etc.
I think most localities have a lot of overly broad, unnecessary, largely unenforced laws like this which essentially mean the government (and other people with influence) have the de facto power to go after whomever they please. Thankfully, at least in my town, it's not currently used too often with too much malice. I'd like to see such laws repealed, but, based on town meetings I've been to, I don't think most other people see it that way.
I wouldn't be so eager to welcome your new corporate overlords. Verizon's business model is based on overselling bandwidth just like Comcast (look at the price vs. bandwidth and that's obvious), and in the end that means they're still not willing to really let you use as much as they say they're selling you. If you look in the TOS for that residential FIOS connection you might be eying you'll find that you're not allowed to operate a "server", or use too much bandwidth, which is, of course, never defined. To wit:
The Service may be referred to as, "Verizon Fios Internet Service", "DSL Service", "Verizon Online DSL, "Verizon DSL"...
3.7.5 You may not use the Broadband Service to host any type of server whether personal or commercial in nature...
ATTACHMENT A
ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY
...
3. You may NOT use the Service as follows:... (n) to generate excessive amounts (as determined by Verizon in its sole discretion) of Internet traffic, or to disrupt net user groups or email use by others;...
[emphasis mine]
Further, consider that P2P software could be considered a server, which would include the bittorrent client you use to download the latest Linux distro or the Skype software you use to make VIOP calls (something Verizon has reason not to like too much).
My point is simply that if you dislike Comcast because of its unstated caps, traffic shaping, QoS stuff etc. I don't see any reason to think Verizon will be any better in the long term. As for customer service, I've had Verizon as a phone provider and found the customer service poor. Perhaps their better as an ISP, but stories I've heard from others suggest that's not the case.
I've personally been using Speakeasy for years. They seem to be much more honest in their dealings, allow you to run a server, and don't (apparently) block or degrade certain protocols, although their TOS still contain some "excessive usage" weasel words IIRC. The only problem is that it's DSL (and not even cheap DSL), so the bandwidth to price ratio isn't nearly what you'd get from Cable or FIOS. On the other hand, I can't stomach the idea of rewarding those other companies' practices.
Obviously it's true that no technological measure has been taken in email to prevent anyone from reading it, so it is, in some sense, more similar to a postcard than a message in a sealed envelope. The argument that one is, therefore, entitled to no privacy seems to fall down, though, for the following reason: No technological measure is taken to protect the contents of a phone conversation, which also goes through networks owned by various different companies. Its contents are no more protected than those of an ordinary conversation. And yet, we do treat a phone conversation as private, and its contents are protected by the 4th amendment (leaving aside the issue of international calls). By analogy, it seems only appropriate that 4th amendment protections should apply to email. It's certainly the case that people using email, by and large, have the expectation of privacy, as evidenced by the sort of things people put in emails.
The other point is that, while I'm in favor of using encryption, it's not really a choice one can make unilaterally, because both sides must be using (and must understand how to use) encryption. I doubt I could get all my friends and family to use encryption on their email correspondence with me, and even if I could there'd still be communications with political groups, businesses, etc. that I might, in principle, want to keep private.
There is a difference between peaceful assembly and non-peaceful assembly. The latter is an act of terrorism and the former is a constitutionally protected right.
[In best Spanish accent]: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You can debate whether violent protest is right or wrong, but it's generally not terrorism by any reasonable definition, most directly because the aim is not asymmetrical conflict to incite terror but direct conflict with authorities to register displeasure. Calling it "terrorism" is not only foolish but is offensive in that it trivializes actual terrorism by grouping it together with these much more innocuous things.
Finally, you seem to dismiss violent protest out of hand as invalid, but that's essentially absurd on its face, since this is just an intermediate level of force, between non-violent protest and outright rebellion, used by the populous to maintain control. I certainly think that violent protests are used in many situations where they are uncalled for, counter-productive, and wrong, but there can also be times they are necessary to show the will of the people (and hopefully avoid all out civil war). Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson:
The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty....what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.
In other words, under the previous administration (at least) 36 terrorists were able to commit their acts before being caught and convicted...
One could convict on charges of conspiracy, weapons possession, etc. before 9/11, so there's no particular reason to think that (unless you have knowledge of the particulars of the cases). It seems you're simply choosing to believe that which would be convenient. A much better objection is that the figure of merit is not terrorist convictions. Presumably it is lives saved. The way terror suspects were treated changed post-9/11 to emphasize prevention rather than conviction.
Did the change work? Unfortunately, that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to estimate if you think about it thoroughly and rationally, something which most people debating the issue seem incapable of. The underlying rate of people trying to commit attacks changes over time (both systematically and by statistical fluctuations), and it's difficult to say what might have happened if things were done differently. Clearly, far more US citizens have died in terrorist attacks under Bush's presidency than at any other time during American history, but there's a good argument that the same would likely have happened to any president who happened to be in office now. If so, it would be a mistake to say Bush's policies were at fault. That alone illustrates some of the subtlety.
Thanks. That's certainly interesting information. Like I said, I couldn't get any straight answers from the FIOS guy I talked to, and the only answer he did give contradicted their TOS. Not that I expected him to know a lot of technical details, but it seems like "is there a cap?" is a pretty basic question.
Concerning running servers on residential FIOS, the easiest place to look seems to be the "Features" section of the FAQ which says:
1. Can I host a Web page?
Verizon FIOS Internet Service consumer packages include 10 MB of personal Web space. The consumer offers do not permit customers to host any type of server, personal or commercial. [emphasis mine]
As for the TOS themselves, I believe these terms of service apply to all Verizon residential internet connections, including FIOS. Some of the parts I don't like are the following:
3.7.5 You may not use the Broadband Service to host any type of server whether personal or commercial in nature....
ATTACHMENT A
ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY
...
3. You may NOT use the Service as follows:... (j) to damage the name or reputation of Verizon, its parent, affiliates and subsidiaries, or any third parties... (n) to generate excessive amounts (as determined by Verizon in its sole discretion) of Internet traffic...
So, at the least, they reserve the right to object to you running a server or violating unstated data transfer caps. And then there's that damaging reputation thing, which I'm not clear on the practical implications of.
It's interesting to know that they may not enforce these on their FIOS connections at the moment. I'd still be sort of reluctant to rely on them continuing to let me violate the TOS in the future, but maybe it's worth it. I really just wish I could get that sort of service from ISP that would deal with me straight.
I would jump on this in a second (FIOS is available in my area) if only it were a true internet connection offered by a real ISP. But (at least if this is a residential plan) if you look at the TOS you will see that it contains weasel words that you can get kicked for, you know, actually using the bandwidth you're ostensibly buying or for running any type of "server", which is really not clearly defined and certainly could include P2P apps (like maybe Skype). So, when you think about it, what you're getting is not really a true internet connection but some limited internet service package that only allows you to do a certain (ill-defined) subset of what can be done with an internet connection.
Finally, in my experience with Verizon (as a phone company) they treat their customers like dirt and their techs are incompetent. At one point they even screwed up our phones then came back to fix that and screwed it up worse. Eventually we had to draw them a damned diagram of how to do it correctly. I also talked to one of the FIOS guys at a kiosk they had in the mall. He couldn't give a straight answer about whether they do traffic shaping, have data transfer caps, or block certain protocols. As a test, I asked him about running a server on a residential connection, and he lied to me and told me it's permitted, which is directly contradicted by the TOS.
I'd love to get a cable or fiber connection that's much faster than my current DSL, if only there were a provider I could tolerate giving my money to.
I agree that no matter what they'll try to spin it to minimize the conflict, but the important question here is what are the facts of the matter? It sounds as if the facts are that one is perfectly free to work with both Google and the O.C.A. (based on the quotes in the article from other parties besides Google). This seems like a fairly reasonable arrangement to me; you have the option to get things scanned for free by Google but with restrictions and/or for a fee by O.C.A. without those restrictions.
The only real danger I can see is that Google will be able to allow you to search all the O.C.A. stuff plus their own stuff, so people may just always go to Google to do their searches. In the end, this may limit the perceived value added for going with the O.C.A. and Google may become the de facto standard. I don't think this is too much of a danger, though, because the people really interested in the O.C.A. are interested for reasons of principle, about academic openness.
Hmm...so I apparently missed page 2 of the article.:-)
Microsoft is part of the O.C.A., except that, "A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft's." Sort of an "embrace and extend" approach?
Jokes aside, this does seem to be a bit more of an open approach than Google's.
Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.
The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
The opposition between the Open Content Alliance and Google may not be as much as it seems at first glance. From the NYT article:
Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted that the company's deals with libraries were not exclusive. "We're excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they sign many more," Mr. Smith said.
It looks like Google will digitize the collection for free in exchange for exclusive rights to offering searches of the digital data, but the libraries don't give up rights to have someone else digitize the stuff again and do with it as they see fit. So they can go with Google for now if they want and the O.C.A. later as they have the resources. This seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't know what the deal Microsoft is offering looks like, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's much more restrictive.
Piracy, as the term is applied to Protected Works is properly called "Infringement" and should be referred to as such. Theft implies that one is deprived of the item so stolen- there is no such thing going on with Infringement......if the deal was, you can download it for nada, etc. you aren't actually infringing.
Huh? Unless the files came with a license expressly allowing redistribution, then I would think that it is copyright infringement to give a copy to someone else, share them on bit torrent, etc. What price they sold it for is irrelevant. Radiohead are still the copyright holders so only they, or people they give rights to, can redistribute. Now, I don't know if they'd be able to get much from you in court if they sued you over infringement (since they were giving it away), but technically you'd be infringing.
...Unless of course you're talking about giving away your only copy to someone (like selling a CD to your friend, rather than ripping him a copy). I have no idea how to make sense of that for digital music that doesn't come on some original physical medium. I know that digital music stores usually have in their user agreements something about non-transferability, but I don't know if that actually is enforceable or what.
But this is hardly the first DRM-free music download service. I've used eMusic off and on for years. How does this compare and how does it improve on the other DRM-free services that already exist? In the past, the main complaint about such services was the lack of mainstream music from major labels. Won't this be the same for Amazon's offering?
It's not whether it's actually realistic but whether the players believe it's a realistic portrayal of being a soldier. In any case, I can't speak to that as I've not played AA, I've only seen screenshots and publicity that touts its realism. And obviously the military probably has for many a bit more credability in this regard than some CS geeks at Valve or id.
But my ethical problem with it has principally to do with it being used as tool for recruiting, not with the game itself. Making a FPS that tries to be realistic for entertainment is one thing. Making a game that claims to be realistic and then coming to the players and saying, "Great, now let's go do it for real!" is something else entirely. I think it's a deceptive way to recruit and cultivates exactly the wrong reasons to wear the uniform, so I object to my tax dollars being used for it.
Anyway, it's far from the top of the list of things I'd like to change about the way my government operates, but I do think it's wrong.
Do you have an ethical problem then with all war games? Or are you saying it is unethical to use it to recruit even though you don't believe it will have any influence on the actual actions of the intended audience?
I think that usually playing violent video games doesn't significantly increase violent behavior. This is a very different situation. This game depicts real people (soldiers) that the players very likely may look up to in what are claimed to be realistic situations. That's very different than most video games, and so I think it could effect a player much more significantly. Still, I don't think AA players are going to go out and form a paramilitary group. I mostly think that it will give impressionable kids a false picture of what it means to be a soldier and that this is intended to lay the groundwork for recruitment. In short, giving away AA is a combination of trick and bribe.
Again, my problem is that AA seems designed to deceive people and get them to join the service for all the wrong reasons. I don't think that's necessarily anything new in recruiting, but that doesn't make it right.
Any time America's Army comes up, I always think about how insane it is that on the one hand many people and politicians in the U.S. are hysterical about video games supposedly causing violent behavior, while at the same time I hear no real objections from these people to their tax dollars being used to develop a game whose explicit point, AFAIK, is to persuade kids to take part in actual violence (by becoming soldiers).
I am not a pacifist, and I don't object to people serving in the military. My father served in the military and so did his father. I think that, whatever the realities, there are some good, noble reasons to become a soldier. I just don't think that "killing people is fun" is one of them.
I also don't really think (in the absence of convincing evidence) that video games generally lead to violent behavior. I do think, though, that a game put out by the Army that touts its realism can shape the ideas of what combat is like in impressionable minds, so I definitely have an ethical problem with them using it as part of a recruiting effort with people who are just coming into adulthood.
I don't see why co-existence would discount evolving from Homo Habilis. Since after all if we really did evolve from primates, there would be no primates today under this logic.
It' still possible that some Homo Habilis evolved into Homo erectus while others remained homo habilis. Just as monkeys evolved into whatever became the H. Habilis, yet monkeys still exist.
As far as I understand it, in order for one species to split into two distinct species the original group has to be split up into two distinct habitats with different selection pressures. If they all remained in the same place, they'd have the same selection pressures and would continue to interbreed so that you wouldn't end up with two distinct genetic groups. However, one species staying in the same place can slowly change into another if selection pressures shift somehow (climate change, arrival of new competition, etc.).
Anthropologists don't think that we evolved from any other currently existing primates. Rather, they think that we share a common ancestor, meaning humans and our closest primate relation (chimps?) both evolved from some other, now extinct, species. I think the idea is that that happened because our ancestors moved into a new habitat, like grasslands, while the other primates stayed in the old habitat, the forest. They continued to adapt to living in one condition and we adapted differently to living under different conditions.
I don't own one, but I was trying one out in the Apple store (out of curiousity only, it's too rich for my blood) and tried looking at Slashdot. As far as I could tell, it seemed to work just fine. I looked at some of the comments and then started to add a comment of my own. I struggled a bit with the typing interface, but most reports seem to indicated that with time it's a decent interface.
In my experience, here in the US bagged, pre-washed vegetables still are considerably more expensive than unprepared ones. I do have any good data, but personal experience suggests that bagged salad greens are widely used, but many people still use unprepared bunches. Outside of greens, I think unprepared vegetables are still the norm if you're buying fresh, although many people may just buy frozen. Personally, I almost never buy prepared vegetables, as I regard it as a waste of money on something I can easily do myself.
The GP complained about the lack of engineers and technical know-how in relation to the bill. I simply pointed out that the bill's author, Holt, has a Ph.D. in Physics, so he does have technical knowledge. It is semi-relevant in this discussion, since we're talking about reforms related to electronic voting machines. The bill doesn't tell anyone to use electronic voting machines (it leaves that issue aside entirely), but it says that if you are going to use them you have to meet certain minimum requirements (though states are free to do even more).
If you're not impressed by Holt's credentials, I might point out that this bill implements things suggested by a NIST study on the subject (that's a bunch of other technical people), and has been endorsed by many e-voting activists and computer security experts, like Prof. Ed Felten and Prof. Avi Rubin. So the idea that this bill is the result of lack of technical knowledge or forethought is baseless.
I am aware that getting SOMETHING done is often seen as necessary. However, I have a prejudice in favour of getting something done RIGHT. If more of our lawmakers worked on the assumption that a bad bill is worse than no bill, we'd all be better off.
Supporters of this bill believe that it will get something good done. At the risk of repeating myself: When you vote on a DRE today your vote is going into a black box. There is no way to know whether the vote that is recorded inside the machine is for the person you selected on the screen. There is no meaningful way to audit the machines, and certainly no attempt is made. This bill mandates that there is a voter-verified paper record of your vote, and it requires audits of the electronic tally in a certain percentage of randomly selected precincts to ensure (statistically) that the electronic tally actually matches the paper one. This clearly is a vital improvement, and it is one that should be made as soon as possible.
Perhaps you would like to see more? Passing this bill does not preclude further reform. Passing a good, but perhaps imperfect, bill now is better than passing nothing at all. If your prejudice is for waiting for a perfect bill, then it will result in nothing getting done at all, which leaves us all much worse off.
There are many examples in Congress of passing a bill simple for the sake of having passes something, but this is not one of them. This bill makes actual improvements.
Like you, I'm not legal expert. Additionally, I personally haven't had the time to devote to studying this issue as much as I'd like. But I tend to trust the interpretation of the bill by the EFF, and I take into consideration the support of the bill by other people to whom I give credence, like Ed Felten. I'm not saying that BBV may not make some valid points, but right now it seems to me that, on balance, it would be better for the bill to pass.
As for ulterior motives, I agree that there are plenty in congress. As far as I'm aware, though, Rush Holt is one of the good guys, someone who is interested in crafting legislation based upon reason and evidence whether or not it's popular. Unfortunately, I think that the more one seeks political power the more one must give up those qualities.
As an aside: I'm pleasantly surprised (ok, shocked) to see someone in the Slashdot discussion change their stance based upon evidence presented. That alone is enough to make me a fan.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't speak on the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture (or lack thereof). It's certainly true that investigating things and gathering factual evidence takes longer than simply doing stuff without gathering evidence, but the trade-off is that the results are better (on average). I mean, if a police officer is investigating a crime it's obviously faster to simply pick one of the people who is believed to have been present and say they are guilty rather than gathering evidence and doing an investigation. And some of the time, this method will get the right person. The downside of this method of police work is that most of the time the officer will get the wrong man. The same applies to medicine.
This is often not a good strategy. In some cases the wrong choice may cause actual damage or simply allow an existing condition to get worse. Even in a more favorable situation where you assume that failure will be benign, it's often just hard to tell whether or not the treatment worked. For example if you're experiencing back pain or you get a cold, these are conditions that can get better on their own due to your body's own restorative powers. If you take some remedy for them and then get better, you may attribute it to the remedy but it may have nothing to do with it.
Again, this depends on the case. There are instances where people delay treatments for serious illnesses, like cancer, in favor of trying alternative cures. In that case there's the potential for serious consequences. When you're talking about things like cold remedies it can be that some ineffective alternative remedies are harmless, other than lost time and money and having to deal with whatever symptoms you were trying to treat longer. There certainly can be cases where, due to insufficient quality control or lack of appropriate labeling alternative medicine puts people in some danger. For example, some fish and shell fish derived remedies are very high in mercury. Another example is ear candling, which can result in people getting burned by hot wax, which, when it happens inside the ear canal, can have serious consequences.
Compare that to pills, and medical treatments in general. Pills almost all have unpleasant side effects (ask any pharmacist... many times, people come back to take pills to fix the stuff the first pills broke). 30% misdiagnosis rates. Surgery and anesthesia risks, addictions, you name it.
Yes, I agree that many medical treatments have significant side effects, and when choosing a treatment that should certainly be taken into account. I don't see any reason to believe that in general alternative medicine will not also have side effects. It's logical to expect that an effective treatment is likely to have side effects, because generally you'd be extraordinarily lucky to discover a technique that only has exactly the effects you want and no others. In addition, in medical testing even the placebo has side effects, due to psychosomatic response. One advantage of traditional medicine, however, is that the side effects are studied and you can be well informed about your choices going in.
Now, there certainly is one class of remedies that won't have si
Well, by that time it will be too late, because the fluoride powered transmitter in your tooth will have alerted the authorities to your plans, and the black helicopters will already be on their way to pick you up.
You can be skeptical of the motives of drug companies, the media, or whomever, but you should not abandon reason or the scientific method, which is where a lot of the critics of "mainstream medicine" go off the deep end. You still should realize that the human body is a complex system and, thus, doing medicine requires significant education and expertise and learning anything about a system requires systematic, controlled experiments done on a large sample with rigorous data analysis. What the amounts to is that you have to be fairly selective in whose advice you take, and, even if it isn't the NIH, logic dictates that it should probably be some other relatively large organization that has people with enough expertise and resources for the necessary testing.
The other key point is that however skeptical you are of the medical establishment you should be equally skeptical of anyone else who steps up to offer you an alternative. Sadly, such skepticism seems to be seldom applied to "alternative medicine".
This is very likely true. To amplify this point, I can say that in my town (a small town of a little over 1000 homes) there are many laws about all sorts of ridiculous minutiae that are only selectively enforced. These include laws that say, for example, that your trash cans can't be visible from the road (unless it's trash day), regulate the length of your grass, etc. As an experiment, one day I walked around my area of the town (which does not seem to be exceptional in any way) and looked for violations of the ordinances. I found roughly one half of the houses I passed had a violation readily apparently from walking by on the road, and that was only based on the ones I remember off the top of my head. This completely ignores other issues like applying for permits, traffic tickets, etc.
I think most localities have a lot of overly broad, unnecessary, largely unenforced laws like this which essentially mean the government (and other people with influence) have the de facto power to go after whomever they please. Thankfully, at least in my town, it's not currently used too often with too much malice. I'd like to see such laws repealed, but, based on town meetings I've been to, I don't think most other people see it that way.
I wouldn't be so eager to welcome your new corporate overlords. Verizon's business model is based on overselling bandwidth just like Comcast (look at the price vs. bandwidth and that's obvious), and in the end that means they're still not willing to really let you use as much as they say they're selling you. If you look in the TOS for that residential FIOS connection you might be eying you'll find that you're not allowed to operate a "server", or use too much bandwidth, which is, of course, never defined. To wit:
[emphasis mine]
Further, consider that P2P software could be considered a server, which would include the bittorrent client you use to download the latest Linux distro or the Skype software you use to make VIOP calls (something Verizon has reason not to like too much).
My point is simply that if you dislike Comcast because of its unstated caps, traffic shaping, QoS stuff etc. I don't see any reason to think Verizon will be any better in the long term. As for customer service, I've had Verizon as a phone provider and found the customer service poor. Perhaps their better as an ISP, but stories I've heard from others suggest that's not the case.
I've personally been using Speakeasy for years. They seem to be much more honest in their dealings, allow you to run a server, and don't (apparently) block or degrade certain protocols, although their TOS still contain some "excessive usage" weasel words IIRC. The only problem is that it's DSL (and not even cheap DSL), so the bandwidth to price ratio isn't nearly what you'd get from Cable or FIOS. On the other hand, I can't stomach the idea of rewarding those other companies' practices.
Obviously it's true that no technological measure has been taken in email to prevent anyone from reading it, so it is, in some sense, more similar to a postcard than a message in a sealed envelope. The argument that one is, therefore, entitled to no privacy seems to fall down, though, for the following reason: No technological measure is taken to protect the contents of a phone conversation, which also goes through networks owned by various different companies. Its contents are no more protected than those of an ordinary conversation. And yet, we do treat a phone conversation as private, and its contents are protected by the 4th amendment (leaving aside the issue of international calls). By analogy, it seems only appropriate that 4th amendment protections should apply to email. It's certainly the case that people using email, by and large, have the expectation of privacy, as evidenced by the sort of things people put in emails.
The other point is that, while I'm in favor of using encryption, it's not really a choice one can make unilaterally, because both sides must be using (and must understand how to use) encryption. I doubt I could get all my friends and family to use encryption on their email correspondence with me, and even if I could there'd still be communications with political groups, businesses, etc. that I might, in principle, want to keep private.
[In best Spanish accent]: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You can debate whether violent protest is right or wrong, but it's generally not terrorism by any reasonable definition, most directly because the aim is not asymmetrical conflict to incite terror but direct conflict with authorities to register displeasure. Calling it "terrorism" is not only foolish but is offensive in that it trivializes actual terrorism by grouping it together with these much more innocuous things.
Finally, you seem to dismiss violent protest out of hand as invalid, but that's essentially absurd on its face, since this is just an intermediate level of force, between non-violent protest and outright rebellion, used by the populous to maintain control. I certainly think that violent protests are used in many situations where they are uncalled for, counter-productive, and wrong, but there can also be times they are necessary to show the will of the people (and hopefully avoid all out civil war). Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson:
One could convict on charges of conspiracy, weapons possession, etc. before 9/11, so there's no particular reason to think that (unless you have knowledge of the particulars of the cases). It seems you're simply choosing to believe that which would be convenient. A much better objection is that the figure of merit is not terrorist convictions. Presumably it is lives saved. The way terror suspects were treated changed post-9/11 to emphasize prevention rather than conviction.
Did the change work? Unfortunately, that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to estimate if you think about it thoroughly and rationally, something which most people debating the issue seem incapable of. The underlying rate of people trying to commit attacks changes over time (both systematically and by statistical fluctuations), and it's difficult to say what might have happened if things were done differently. Clearly, far more US citizens have died in terrorist attacks under Bush's presidency than at any other time during American history, but there's a good argument that the same would likely have happened to any president who happened to be in office now. If so, it would be a mistake to say Bush's policies were at fault. That alone illustrates some of the subtlety.
Thanks. That's certainly interesting information. Like I said, I couldn't get any straight answers from the FIOS guy I talked to, and the only answer he did give contradicted their TOS. Not that I expected him to know a lot of technical details, but it seems like "is there a cap?" is a pretty basic question.
Concerning running servers on residential FIOS, the easiest place to look seems to be the "Features" section of the FAQ which says:
As for the TOS themselves, I believe these terms of service apply to all Verizon residential internet connections, including FIOS. Some of the parts I don't like are the following:
So, at the least, they reserve the right to object to you running a server or violating unstated data transfer caps. And then there's that damaging reputation thing, which I'm not clear on the practical implications of.
It's interesting to know that they may not enforce these on their FIOS connections at the moment. I'd still be sort of reluctant to rely on them continuing to let me violate the TOS in the future, but maybe it's worth it. I really just wish I could get that sort of service from ISP that would deal with me straight.
I would jump on this in a second (FIOS is available in my area) if only it were a true internet connection offered by a real ISP. But (at least if this is a residential plan) if you look at the TOS you will see that it contains weasel words that you can get kicked for, you know, actually using the bandwidth you're ostensibly buying or for running any type of "server", which is really not clearly defined and certainly could include P2P apps (like maybe Skype). So, when you think about it, what you're getting is not really a true internet connection but some limited internet service package that only allows you to do a certain (ill-defined) subset of what can be done with an internet connection.
Finally, in my experience with Verizon (as a phone company) they treat their customers like dirt and their techs are incompetent. At one point they even screwed up our phones then came back to fix that and screwed it up worse. Eventually we had to draw them a damned diagram of how to do it correctly. I also talked to one of the FIOS guys at a kiosk they had in the mall. He couldn't give a straight answer about whether they do traffic shaping, have data transfer caps, or block certain protocols. As a test, I asked him about running a server on a residential connection, and he lied to me and told me it's permitted, which is directly contradicted by the TOS.
I'd love to get a cable or fiber connection that's much faster than my current DSL, if only there were a provider I could tolerate giving my money to.
I agree that no matter what they'll try to spin it to minimize the conflict, but the important question here is what are the facts of the matter? It sounds as if the facts are that one is perfectly free to work with both Google and the O.C.A. (based on the quotes in the article from other parties besides Google). This seems like a fairly reasonable arrangement to me; you have the option to get things scanned for free by Google but with restrictions and/or for a fee by O.C.A. without those restrictions.
The only real danger I can see is that Google will be able to allow you to search all the O.C.A. stuff plus their own stuff, so people may just always go to Google to do their searches. In the end, this may limit the perceived value added for going with the O.C.A. and Google may become the de facto standard. I don't think this is too much of a danger, though, because the people really interested in the O.C.A. are interested for reasons of principle, about academic openness.
In the end, I do hope that openness wins out.
Hmm...so I apparently missed page 2 of the article. :-)
Microsoft is part of the O.C.A., except that, "A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft's." Sort of an "embrace and extend" approach?
Jokes aside, this does seem to be a bit more of an open approach than Google's.
There's a story about this in The New York Times this morning (free reg required). It begins:
The opposition between the Open Content Alliance and Google may not be as much as it seems at first glance. From the NYT article:
It looks like Google will digitize the collection for free in exchange for exclusive rights to offering searches of the digital data, but the libraries don't give up rights to have someone else digitize the stuff again and do with it as they see fit. So they can go with Google for now if they want and the O.C.A. later as they have the resources. This seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't know what the deal Microsoft is offering looks like, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's much more restrictive.
Huh? Unless the files came with a license expressly allowing redistribution, then I would think that it is copyright infringement to give a copy to someone else, share them on bit torrent, etc. What price they sold it for is irrelevant. Radiohead are still the copyright holders so only they, or people they give rights to, can redistribute. Now, I don't know if they'd be able to get much from you in court if they sued you over infringement (since they were giving it away), but technically you'd be infringing.
I guess another point is that I gather you could buy single tracks from Amazon whereas eMusic uses a subscription model.
But this is hardly the first DRM-free music download service. I've used eMusic off and on for years. How does this compare and how does it improve on the other DRM-free services that already exist? In the past, the main complaint about such services was the lack of mainstream music from major labels. Won't this be the same for Amazon's offering?
It's not whether it's actually realistic but whether the players believe it's a realistic portrayal of being a soldier. In any case, I can't speak to that as I've not played AA, I've only seen screenshots and publicity that touts its realism. And obviously the military probably has for many a bit more credability in this regard than some CS geeks at Valve or id.
But my ethical problem with it has principally to do with it being used as tool for recruiting, not with the game itself. Making a FPS that tries to be realistic for entertainment is one thing. Making a game that claims to be realistic and then coming to the players and saying, "Great, now let's go do it for real!" is something else entirely. I think it's a deceptive way to recruit and cultivates exactly the wrong reasons to wear the uniform, so I object to my tax dollars being used for it.
Anyway, it's far from the top of the list of things I'd like to change about the way my government operates, but I do think it's wrong.
I think that usually playing violent video games doesn't significantly increase violent behavior. This is a very different situation. This game depicts real people (soldiers) that the players very likely may look up to in what are claimed to be realistic situations. That's very different than most video games, and so I think it could effect a player much more significantly. Still, I don't think AA players are going to go out and form a paramilitary group. I mostly think that it will give impressionable kids a false picture of what it means to be a soldier and that this is intended to lay the groundwork for recruitment. In short, giving away AA is a combination of trick and bribe.
Again, my problem is that AA seems designed to deceive people and get them to join the service for all the wrong reasons. I don't think that's necessarily anything new in recruiting, but that doesn't make it right.
Any time America's Army comes up, I always think about how insane it is that on the one hand many people and politicians in the U.S. are hysterical about video games supposedly causing violent behavior, while at the same time I hear no real objections from these people to their tax dollars being used to develop a game whose explicit point, AFAIK, is to persuade kids to take part in actual violence (by becoming soldiers).
I am not a pacifist, and I don't object to people serving in the military. My father served in the military and so did his father. I think that, whatever the realities, there are some good, noble reasons to become a soldier. I just don't think that "killing people is fun" is one of them.
I also don't really think (in the absence of convincing evidence) that video games generally lead to violent behavior. I do think, though, that a game put out by the Army that touts its realism can shape the ideas of what combat is like in impressionable minds, so I definitely have an ethical problem with them using it as part of a recruiting effort with people who are just coming into adulthood.
I'd never heard of OpenMoko before, but that actually sounds really cool, so count this as one interested party.
As far as I understand it, in order for one species to split into two distinct species the original group has to be split up into two distinct habitats with different selection pressures. If they all remained in the same place, they'd have the same selection pressures and would continue to interbreed so that you wouldn't end up with two distinct genetic groups. However, one species staying in the same place can slowly change into another if selection pressures shift somehow (climate change, arrival of new competition, etc.).
Anthropologists don't think that we evolved from any other currently existing primates. Rather, they think that we share a common ancestor, meaning humans and our closest primate relation (chimps?) both evolved from some other, now extinct, species. I think the idea is that that happened because our ancestors moved into a new habitat, like grasslands, while the other primates stayed in the old habitat, the forest. They continued to adapt to living in one condition and we adapted differently to living under different conditions.
I don't own one, but I was trying one out in the Apple store (out of curiousity only, it's too rich for my blood) and tried looking at Slashdot. As far as I could tell, it seemed to work just fine. I looked at some of the comments and then started to add a comment of my own. I struggled a bit with the typing interface, but most reports seem to indicated that with time it's a decent interface.
In my experience, here in the US bagged, pre-washed vegetables still are considerably more expensive than unprepared ones. I do have any good data, but personal experience suggests that bagged salad greens are widely used, but many people still use unprepared bunches. Outside of greens, I think unprepared vegetables are still the norm if you're buying fresh, although many people may just buy frozen. Personally, I almost never buy prepared vegetables, as I regard it as a waste of money on something I can easily do myself.
Well, his district in NJ also includes Princeton. I'd bet that helps.
The GP complained about the lack of engineers and technical know-how in relation to the bill. I simply pointed out that the bill's author, Holt, has a Ph.D. in Physics, so he does have technical knowledge. It is semi-relevant in this discussion, since we're talking about reforms related to electronic voting machines. The bill doesn't tell anyone to use electronic voting machines (it leaves that issue aside entirely), but it says that if you are going to use them you have to meet certain minimum requirements (though states are free to do even more).
If you're not impressed by Holt's credentials, I might point out that this bill implements things suggested by a NIST study on the subject (that's a bunch of other technical people), and has been endorsed by many e-voting activists and computer security experts, like Prof. Ed Felten and Prof. Avi Rubin. So the idea that this bill is the result of lack of technical knowledge or forethought is baseless.
Supporters of this bill believe that it will get something good done. At the risk of repeating myself: When you vote on a DRE today your vote is going into a black box. There is no way to know whether the vote that is recorded inside the machine is for the person you selected on the screen. There is no meaningful way to audit the machines, and certainly no attempt is made. This bill mandates that there is a voter-verified paper record of your vote, and it requires audits of the electronic tally in a certain percentage of randomly selected precincts to ensure (statistically) that the electronic tally actually matches the paper one. This clearly is a vital improvement, and it is one that should be made as soon as possible.
Perhaps you would like to see more? Passing this bill does not preclude further reform. Passing a good, but perhaps imperfect, bill now is better than passing nothing at all. If your prejudice is for waiting for a perfect bill, then it will result in nothing getting done at all, which leaves us all much worse off.
There are many examples in Congress of passing a bill simple for the sake of having passes something, but this is not one of them. This bill makes actual improvements.
Like you, I'm not legal expert. Additionally, I personally haven't had the time to devote to studying this issue as much as I'd like. But I tend to trust the interpretation of the bill by the EFF, and I take into consideration the support of the bill by other people to whom I give credence, like Ed Felten. I'm not saying that BBV may not make some valid points, but right now it seems to me that, on balance, it would be better for the bill to pass.
As for ulterior motives, I agree that there are plenty in congress. As far as I'm aware, though, Rush Holt is one of the good guys, someone who is interested in crafting legislation based upon reason and evidence whether or not it's popular. Unfortunately, I think that the more one seeks political power the more one must give up those qualities.
As an aside: I'm pleasantly surprised (ok, shocked) to see someone in the Slashdot discussion change their stance based upon evidence presented. That alone is enough to make me a fan. :-)