Crystals storing healing "energy".Quartz is piezoelectric, 'nuff said.
Too easy. And why does this energy have to be electrical, or indeed anything known to science?
Homeopathic cures. Anyone heard of Avogadro's number?
That sounds like a knockdown refutation, but even then - actually it's not. Anyone heard of the controversial phenomenon of water memory? Some argue that water memory has been demonstrated empirically - and may provide the beginnings of an explanation for homeopathy - an explanation which does not rely on having nonzero quantities of "active ingredient" in the solution.
(We have a cat in our house who takes a homeopathic remedy in her water, and she's noticeably less skittish now than before. Personally, I'm giving homeopathy the benefit of the doubt.)
"Natural" cures being better than pharmacuticals. Lead and Radon exist in nature, should we take those too?
The point is not that they're better merely because they're natural. The point is that, if some natural remedies seem to work well and pharmaceuticals seem (according to statistics in the JAMA) to kill and hurt a lot of people, we're seeing a pattern here. Maybe pharmaceutical corps push not what is best for a given condition but what is most profitable to them.
Aromatic healing. No comment needed.
It's well known that happiness, humour, optimism and placebos can all be beneficial in the healing process. Simply put, healthy mind, healthy body. So, why reject "aromatic healing" out of hand?
Ignorance of science explains why some people fall for "alternative" baloney - but I think it also explains why some people, like you, are too quick to dismiss valid research avenues.
Some physicists have speculated that gravity has a "mechanism" in the form of graviton particles. But (AFAIK) this has not been proven. But does (or did) this lack of a "mechanism" bother scientists? Hardly. They are happy to model gravity as "spooky action at a distance" or "curvature of spacetime" for most purposes. Why can't telepathy also be modelled as "spooky action at a distance" (whose reliability depends on aptitude, training, and/or psychological conditions of the subjects)?
One of the freedoms we have to accept is that MS is allowed to express their views on GPL.
Express their views, yes. But not lie. They should not be allowed to make false claims such as "the GPL prevents commercialisation of research".
I don't accept that corporations have the "freedom" to lie about the GPL (or anything else). Corporations are not human beings and should not have human rights. In fact a recent decision by the California Supreme Court - where Nike tried to argue that they had a Free Speech right to lie about sweatshops in advertisements, and the court disagreed - affirms this view. This case may now go all the way to the Supreme Court. Which is interesting, because even the Chief Justice of the S.C. - not a rock-throwing anarchist by any means - has expressed the same kind of view in a dissenting opinion in a previous case.
No, I think you are putting words into MS's mouth. Microsoft isn't complaining about not being able to use GPLed code.
Um, yes they are! They actually go further and claim in these slides that government use of GPL for research software means that "the results of the research can never be commercialised". This is simply untrue.
One, it can be commercialised by reimplementing and adding value. Algorithms are not covered by copyright - they are only covered by patents which has nothing much to do with the GPL. Two, in the unlikely event that a cross-platform GPL utility were to do a little task perfectly with no possibility for improvement, there would be no point in having a non-free competitor. Commercialisation is only useful when it produces something of value. If it does produce something of value, then what's the problem?
Answer: nothing. MS are being deliberately misleading here.
Don't forget, this is coming from the same company that once said "The GPL is like a cancer".
In todays networked world, files move around from system to system, if the meta info doesn't go with it, its not right.
That's a very good point - which a lot of people seem to miss completely! If we're going to have to rewrite FTP, HTTP, etc. to know about extended metadata, or zip files up into special archives every time we want to transfer any file over the Internet, that seems like a bad idea.
IMHO, extended metadata should be stored in the file - not outside the file in the filesystem - as far as possible. Like in MS Word and its document summaries (except that that's an undocumented set of formats, of course).
The paid ~$500 million to the Indian Government for ongoing cleanup, to create a medical program for anyone who lives in the affected area, and to cover things like ongoing monitoring of the chemical creep. They also paid out an additional ~$20 million to build and maintain a new hospital specifically in the area to handle any related medical claims. They also added an additional ~$55 million dollars to the hospital support funds when they bought out UCI.
Well, that's good if true. But that's not enough. Let's see what Greenpeace says:
The survivors have never received adequate compensation for their debilitating illnesses and even 18 years after the disaster, the polluted site of the abandoned factory, bleeds poisons daily into the groundwater of local residents.
In the criminal proceedings in courts in India, preceding the settlement, UC and members of its senior staff (including Chairman Warren Anderson) refused to appear in court or obey court orders. Warren Anderson and UC were notified as absconders by the court.
This settlement was made without any consultation with the survivors. The survivors petitioned the court against the settlement. The court ruled that the settlement did not remove criminal liability from UC, UCIL and senior staff mentioned in the initial criminal case.
These figures should be compared to $108 million that Monsanto Company was ordered to pay the family of a single chemical worker who died due to benzene exposure or the $2.5 billion offered by Johns Manville Corporation for about 60,000 claimants of injury caused by exposure to asbestos. (5)
As per the current settlement, the average claimant (the gas affected who put in a claim for compensation) receive approximately $300-$500, which in most cases does not pay for medical bills.
...
# Myth. An independent investigation claimed that a disgruntled employee caused the incident.
Reality. Even though UC has had an opportunity in court to provide information on this sabotage theory, originally presented by Arthur D. Little (ADL), and thus resolve the case, it has failed to do so. However, the corporation still promotes this argument. When this theory was proposed in an international seminar, there was widespread condemnation by experts. A safety specialist with the World Bank noted that he "was shocked when [he] heard that ADL people were promoting the "sabotage" theory for Bhopal at the Institution of Chemical Engineers conference in London." (12)
See also this page on Carbide/Dow's ongoing negligence with respect to poisoning of water supplies.
I don't know much about Bhopal so I thought it best to quote directly, but I couldn't let such one-sided bullshit stand unchallenged.
Are you by any chance an astroturfer working for Dow? Maybe you're not, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of the pro-Dow arguments here came from astroturfers.
(If ad homenim arguments can be used against Greenpeace, I don't see why I shouldn't use ad homenim arguments right back!)
Because we are physiologically omnivores and need both animals as well as plants to stay healthy.
That's simply not true. The founder of the Vegan Society is still alive and well to this day. Carl Lewis was (is?) a vegan. I've met a 75-year-old vegan granny at an animal rights protest who was in good health for her age. There's plenty more examples I could cite.
Vegetarians in general and vegans in particular need to go through effort to find suitable replacements for the protiens they would be getting otherwise in order to maintain status quo.
The only thing vegans like me can't get reliably in their diets, except from "artificial" sources, is Vitamin B12 - I take vegan B12 supplements to make sure I get enough.
However, I obviously would recommend anyone thinking of going vegan to read up on the dietary recommendations before jumping in.
If you can't carry enough food and need to grow it, animals are going to be less space-efficient than plants, because with animals you need to feed the non-human animals as well as the humans. Vat-grown meat might reduce this inefficiency down to acceptable levels, of course.
This is now easy to do on Linux without patching the kernel - thanks to the loop-aes project. The installation instructions are very detailed and comprehensive.
Personally, I only encrypt some of my partitions, for efficiency reasons, but in principle it's possible to encrypt all of your partitions (except a tiny/boot partitition).
I don't need to say how well you can screw someone over with thier SSN
Why is the US system so ridiculously vulnerable to identity theft? What would it take to secure the system? Can any Europeans opine on whether European smartcard identity systems are more or less secure than SSNs?
Maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't, but the point is it provides a positive example of how to engage the government in promoting open source - whatever country you're in. That's of interest to a lot of us, I think - not just the Indian Slashdotters.;-)
As someone with same opinion as the poster you replied to, I have to say, comments like this really make me cringe: "suppose Lisp does represent a kind of limit that mainstream languages are approaching asymptotically - does that mean you should actually use it to write software? How much do you lose by using a less powerful language? Isn't it wiser, sometimes, not to be at the very edge of innovation?"
This is the signal for an embarrased cough, because, um, LISP isn't at the very edge of innovation. Not one of the differences cited by the article has no close equivalent in the Java space, for example - even instant evaluation is supported by BeanShell, which - while technically a different language - supports almost all of the Java syntax and API. And all objects carry function pointers implicitly. If you don't grok that, either you don't understand OOP, or you're making a false mountain ("Java doesn't have function pointers!") out of a molehill ("Java anonymous classes are long-winded to write, and they can only see local variables if they're declared final"). Big deal.
Actually, it is fair. By your logic, we should ban exports of all scientific and medical journals overseas, on the theory that they would allow foreigners to capitalise for free on research paid for by American taxpayers.
Your "solution" seems to be to kick poor people back into poverty, shut the protectionist gates behind you, and thumb your nose at them like some latter-day Scrooge. My solution is to build a socialist society where workers on one area of the earth's surface do not need to be divided against workers on another area of the earth's surface due to the inefficiencies and irrationalities of capitalism. There is plenty of food, clothing and shelter to go around.
Don't you think it's unlikely that a CD player would break in such a way that it still worked perfectly for some CDs and not others? In a consistent way. This seems like an implausible explanation to me.
I strongly disagree. Political freedom should be about freedom from bogus limitations (like "sedition" laws of the past where you were guilty even if your allegations are completely true, or today's bogus marijuana laws), not all artificial limitations. Laws against pretty much anything, including rape and murder, can be construed as "artificial" limitations, but that doesn't imply we should get rid of them!
If Panthip Plaza can stay open year after year after year after year, then there's no fucking way the BSA is doing a thing in as chickenshit a country as jordan.
Did you even read the article? MS not only sent reps to this conference, they even co-sponsored it!
The BSA is basically a front group for Microsoft, and other proprietary software companise. Granted, it may or may not be doing much in Jordan, but MS is certainly worried about sales in Jordan and making its views known! If they weren't worried, why would they care about the conference?
That's because you are. You exaggerated. Your own stats disprove your claim. First, the math doesn't work, and second, your stats are not for "backyard pool drowning" but for all drownings put together.
Not to be pedantic, but if Microsoft was as pure a monopoly as everyone says they are, then they'd have no interest in offering discount deals to anyone. As they only game in town, they could set their prices arbitrarily.
That's not logically sound. Even a monopoly like Microsoft has to compete with older versions of its own products. (In principle, they also have to compete with non-computerised solutions to problems).
Yeah, but that's mostly due to gun crime in particularly dangerous areas, I believe.
If you look at the big picture, you'll see that in the US far more people are killed with guns than in the UK (even proportional to population). But simple statistics can be pulled out to support either side of the gun argument - it's not that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Too easy. And why does this energy have to be electrical, or indeed anything known to science?
Homeopathic cures. Anyone heard of Avogadro's number?
That sounds like a knockdown refutation, but even then - actually it's not. Anyone heard of the controversial phenomenon of water memory? Some argue that water memory has been demonstrated empirically - and may provide the beginnings of an explanation for homeopathy - an explanation which does not rely on having nonzero quantities of "active ingredient" in the solution.
(We have a cat in our house who takes a homeopathic remedy in her water, and she's noticeably less skittish now than before. Personally, I'm giving homeopathy the benefit of the doubt.)
"Natural" cures being better than pharmacuticals. Lead and Radon exist in nature, should we take those too?
The point is not that they're better merely because they're natural. The point is that, if some natural remedies seem to work well and pharmaceuticals seem (according to statistics in the JAMA) to kill and hurt a lot of people, we're seeing a pattern here. Maybe pharmaceutical corps push not what is best for a given condition but what is most profitable to them.
Aromatic healing. No comment needed.
It's well known that happiness, humour, optimism and placebos can all be beneficial in the healing process. Simply put, healthy mind, healthy body. So, why reject "aromatic healing" out of hand?
Ignorance of science explains why some people fall for "alternative" baloney - but I think it also explains why some people, like you, are too quick to dismiss valid research avenues.
Some physicists have speculated that gravity has a "mechanism" in the form of graviton particles. But (AFAIK) this has not been proven. But does (or did) this lack of a "mechanism" bother scientists? Hardly. They are happy to model gravity as "spooky action at a distance" or "curvature of spacetime" for most purposes. Why can't telepathy also be modelled as "spooky action at a distance" (whose reliability depends on aptitude, training, and/or psychological conditions of the subjects)?
Express their views, yes. But not lie. They should not be allowed to make false claims such as "the GPL prevents commercialisation of research".
I don't accept that corporations have the "freedom" to lie about the GPL (or anything else). Corporations are not human beings and should not have human rights. In fact a recent decision by the California Supreme Court - where Nike tried to argue that they had a Free Speech right to lie about sweatshops in advertisements, and the court disagreed - affirms this view. This case may now go all the way to the Supreme Court. Which is interesting, because even the Chief Justice of the S.C. - not a rock-throwing anarchist by any means - has expressed the same kind of view in a dissenting opinion in a previous case.
Um, yes they are! They actually go further and claim in these slides that government use of GPL for research software means that "the results of the research can never be commercialised". This is simply untrue.
One, it can be commercialised by reimplementing and adding value. Algorithms are not covered by copyright - they are only covered by patents which has nothing much to do with the GPL. Two, in the unlikely event that a cross-platform GPL utility were to do a little task perfectly with no possibility for improvement, there would be no point in having a non-free competitor. Commercialisation is only useful when it produces something of value. If it does produce something of value, then what's the problem?
Answer: nothing. MS are being deliberately misleading here.
Don't forget, this is coming from the same company that once said "The GPL is like a cancer".
That's a very good point - which a lot of people seem to miss completely! If we're going to have to rewrite FTP, HTTP, etc. to know about extended metadata, or zip files up into special archives every time we want to transfer any file over the Internet, that seems like a bad idea.
IMHO, extended metadata should be stored in the file - not outside the file in the filesystem - as far as possible. Like in MS Word and its document summaries (except that that's an undocumented set of formats, of course).
Well, that's good if true. But that's not enough. Let's see what Greenpeace says:
And in more detail from their myths and realities page: See also this page on Carbide/Dow's ongoing negligence with respect to poisoning of water supplies.I don't know much about Bhopal so I thought it best to quote directly, but I couldn't let such one-sided bullshit stand unchallenged.
Are you by any chance an astroturfer working for Dow? Maybe you're not, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of the pro-Dow arguments here came from astroturfers.
(If ad homenim arguments can be used against Greenpeace, I don't see why I shouldn't use ad homenim arguments right back!)
That's simply not true. The founder of the Vegan Society is still alive and well to this day. Carl Lewis was (is?) a vegan. I've met a 75-year-old vegan granny at an animal rights protest who was in good health for her age. There's plenty more examples I could cite.
Vegetarians in general and vegans in particular need to go through effort to find suitable replacements for the protiens they would be getting otherwise in order to maintain status quo.
Not really. See this factsheet on protein.
The only thing vegans like me can't get reliably in their diets, except from "artificial" sources, is Vitamin B12 - I take vegan B12 supplements to make sure I get enough.
However, I obviously would recommend anyone thinking of going vegan to read up on the dietary recommendations before jumping in.
Personally, I only encrypt some of my partitions, for efficiency reasons, but in principle it's possible to encrypt all of your partitions (except a tiny /boot partitition).
Why is the US system so ridiculously vulnerable to identity theft? What would it take to secure the system? Can any Europeans opine on whether European smartcard identity systems are more or less secure than SSNs?
Wonderful logic there! You should be a politician!
Can I suggest that in fact, poor attention to security might be the fundamental problem here, not the US military's supposed "underfunding".
Case in point, a UI flaw I've encountered several times in student labs:
C-x C-o
BEEP Minibuffer already active
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP Minibuffer already active you idiot!
Oops. ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC damnit. Hit ESC too many times. Now I have to ESC to ESC out of the ESC...
Not exactly what I'd call user friendly, that.
Maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't, but the point is it provides a positive example of how to engage the government in promoting open source - whatever country you're in. That's of interest to a lot of us, I think - not just the Indian Slashdotters. ;-)
This is the signal for an embarrased cough, because, um, LISP isn't at the very edge of innovation. Not one of the differences cited by the article has no close equivalent in the Java space, for example - even instant evaluation is supported by BeanShell, which - while technically a different language - supports almost all of the Java syntax and API. And all objects carry function pointers implicitly. If you don't grok that, either you don't understand OOP, or you're making a false mountain ("Java doesn't have function pointers!") out of a molehill ("Java anonymous classes are long-winded to write, and they can only see local variables if they're declared final"). Big deal.
Your "solution" seems to be to kick poor people back into poverty, shut the protectionist gates behind you, and thumb your nose at them like some latter-day Scrooge. My solution is to build a socialist society where workers on one area of the earth's surface do not need to be divided against workers on another area of the earth's surface due to the inefficiencies and irrationalities of capitalism. There is plenty of food, clothing and shelter to go around.
If you don't know the answer to that question, perhaps you shouldn't be mocking something you don't understand.
Did you even read the article? MS not only sent reps to this conference, they even co-sponsored it!
The BSA is basically a front group for Microsoft, and other proprietary software companise. Granted, it may or may not be doing much in Jordan, but MS is certainly worried about sales in Jordan and making its views known! If they weren't worried, why would they care about the conference?
That's because you are. You exaggerated. Your own stats disprove your claim. First, the math doesn't work, and second, your stats are not for "backyard pool drowning" but for all drownings put together.
That's not logically sound. Even a monopoly like Microsoft has to compete with older versions of its own products. (In principle, they also have to compete with non-computerised solutions to problems).
How about the "for the victims" pitch?
If a criminal knows that you are probably armed, he is more likely to be more violent (e.g. shoot first, no warning, to avoid being killed himself).
Yeah, but that's mostly due to gun crime in particularly dangerous areas, I believe.
If you look at the big picture, you'll see that in the US far more people are killed with guns than in the UK (even proportional to population). But simple statistics can be pulled out to support either side of the gun argument - it's not that simple.